


Dripping Eyes, Flooded Lungs

by anewvillain



Series: Dripping Eyes, Flooded Lungs [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Body Horror, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Generally Reckless Disregard For One's Own Safety, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Secrets, Self-Harm, Supernatural Elements, Temporary Character Death, Unhealthy Relationships, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:04:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 37,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4407566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anewvillain/pseuds/anewvillain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dipper returns to Gravity Falls for his 19th summer, rediscovering one particular mystery he'd hardly scratched the surface of seven years ago. When he isn't assisting his great uncle Ford, he spends his time documenting the tangled threads of a lake spirit's past and trying to uncover the secrets behind her existence. Of course, his interest is purely academic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Why was he even here?

He kicked pebbles off the path in front of him– the path that opened up to the sandy shore of Gravity Falls Lake, morphing into an old and unkempt dock reaching out and half-taken by the water. He didn’t even know if it was still safe to walk on. Did he ever know that it was?

Not much had changed in the seven years since he’d been here. The dock was still just as dilapidated, its wood bleached even further than he remembered. Moss crept over everything that dared draw too close to the softly lapping water. The path here was still obstructed by brush, occasional litter washed up and half-buried in sand, hot summer sun beating down on the cool lake stretching toward the mysterious island on the horizon.

It was the same place he'd spent lazy summer evenings as a boy. But this time... it was quiet. Lonely. No voices laughing ahead, awaiting his arrival, or footsteps traipsing along behind him, matching his own; it was complete solitude. He'd already bid his teary goodbyes to Mabel for their first summer apart, fairly sure her hugs had left bruises on his arms. The days that they used to spend here together seemed a lifetime away—and although he’d come here in some quiet hope for companionship, as his sneakers sank into the dirt shore, he wasn’t sure he would find any.

She only appeared for children. He knew that. It was in the books he'd spent hours poring over, chewing pens late at night and taking the greatest pains to memorize every last letter before his great uncle asked for them back. He also knew that, of the few children she had befriended, each one had slowly forgotten her. Including him.

It was a terribly guilty feeling, one he’d been trying to avoid since he went home to California at that all-too-brief summer’s end. He had to go back to school, it was inevitable, and he missed home, despite the temporary one he’d made in Gravity Falls. So he'd promised her that he would come back in a year. At the time, he had believed it. But after that catastrophic and incredible summer, his great uncle Ford was reluctant to have children around his research—despite how careful and responsible he’d assured the older gentleman he would be. All the awkward hours spent on the phone trying to convince him felt more like chipping at a brick wall with a tin spoon. Eventually his persistence paid off, though he had the feeling it would be less of a summer vacation and more of an internship. Even the sturdiest walls had their weak points.

But it had been so long. She might not even remember– or recognize– him. Even if she did… she might not want to.

He didn’t know where to start. She was always just… there. He would run across the dock with books stacked in his arms, blink, and she'd appear with a smile. Some days he would sit there poring over the journal for a good half hour before he looked over and realized that her big, dark eyes had been watching him from the water all the while. Back then she was such a permanent fixture in Gravity Falls, he had never considered that she wouldn't be there before he even thought of her.

Somehow, saying her name felt like an impossibility, a language he’d forgotten after seven long years.

“Are you there?”

He waited in silence, toeing a twig off the dock and into the murky water below. No response.

“I know you… probably don’t want to talk to me. Hah, I wouldn’t want to talk to me, either. Um…” He hated the way his voice still cracked. He’d even asked the doctor about it at one of his checkups. Apparently some voices were simply more prone to it than others– or, as he was inclined to think of it, more cursed than others.

“I’m sorry.” He apologized to an empty lake, sitting cross-legged on the nearly burning wooden dock. “I couldn’t get back to Gravity Falls for a long time. You know how it is…” She didn’t. He knew she didn’t. Kicking himself already. “But I wanted to see you again. Me and Mabel both did.”

“Dipper Pines.” At his side, her voice– strangely hoarse, as if she was unused to speaking. Of course she would show up for him. Of course she would.

Her great, entirely black and void-like eyes stared up at him in much the same way they used to: cautious, but full of wonder. Her chin touched the water as if she were still ready to duck under and flee at a moment’s notice, doe-like ears swiveled in his direction: the better to hear him with. He couldn't help the slight smile that cracked his expression. He felt twelve again, transported to a simpler, easier time. Well... it was easier in some ways.

"Where is your sister?"

"She's... not here. Yet. She'll visit for a couple of weeks this summer, so you'll get to see her—just, later."

"I see." Her ears drooped just slightly, betraying her disappointment. She and Mabel were always excited to see one another. If his sister were here, it would certainly lighten things up; despite how relieved he was that she had shown her face, it brought with it an entirely new set of problems. Luckily, she piped up again before he was able to catastrophize over their conversation options.

“You’re different…” Her high voice spoke tentatively, unnaturally long, black fingers creeping over a barely-attached wooden plank as she waded closer.

“Yeah…” He couldn’t say the same. She was just as she had been when he first met her, all immortal youth and kelp still tangled in her soaking wet hair. It pooled at the waterline in locks of moonlight.

“Same hat.” A quiet smile tugged at her cheeks. “Couldn’t find a better one to replace it?”

“Well, some things never change,” he laughed nervously.

“All things change. It is a question of when.” Dropping cryptic, ancient wisdom into casual conversation with a sharp-toothed smile, as usual. “But even if you change– I can recognize you.” Her wet, spindly hand reached up, pushing his hat and hair away from his forehead. “My little constellation. Such is the power of a witch.” She left his forehead dripping, which he had to wipe away with the back of his hand. Water. He’d had lots of dreams about water lately. Water over his head, keeping him afloat, taking him under, around his legs, his throat.

Water took his hand, rolling up his sleeves with a damp touch.

“Look at these,” she cooed, impressed with the bands and symbols inscribed there. “Children getting tattoos younger and younger.”

“Really? I’m not a kid anymore,” he said with a tense laugh. The water spirit gave him a knowing look.

“Always in such a hurry to grow up. One day you’ll look back and wish you were young again.” She smiled. “Or you can become like me. Young forever. I can drag you to the bottom of the lake and make you immortal.”

It was still hard to tell when she was joking. Or, he hoped she was joking.

“Kells, your sense of humor is kind of messed up.” Her name felt clumsy in his mouth, like a long-forgotten language. And like an unpracticed tongue, in a way, it felt familiar. Like coming home.

“I guess hanging around Bill Cipher for too long will do that to a person.” The name brought him abruptly back to reality.

“Has he come back?”

The question was out of his mouth before he realized what a nightmare it was to ask of her. Her sad smile was enough of an answer, but she gave a spoken one anyway.

“Not so much as a peep. That’s a good thing, right?” He hadn’t realized that she had yet to return his hand; it was still in her grasp, her gaze fixed on it, thumbs kneading his palm while she spoke. “Your hands are so big now. I remember when they were like a little doll’s.”

“Come on, they weren’t that small.”

“Were too. Little Dipper and his nervous, sweaty doll hands.” She teased him with a mischievous smile.

“Come on, shut up,” he laughed, his other hand plunging into the water to splash her half-heartedly. The water creature took it in stride, giggling herself, and released his palm from her grasp. “You wouldn’t even know if they were sweaty—your hands are always wet.”

“Touché. But I heard enough from Mabel about your sweating problem."

“Oh god, not this again...” He groaned, clapping his hands over his eyes in mock fatigue. “I come back after seven years, and you wanna talk about my awkward puberty stage.” This elicited a proper laugh from her, a sound he’d always thought resembled a group of bubbles breaking the water’s surface. To him, it was comfort. It was safety. Of all the uncertainty in Gravity Falls, the risks and the mysteries, there were only a few things he could find stability in: the diner opened at six, mosquito bites were cruel and unavoidable, and Kells would always laugh at his terrible jokes.

She bobbed above the water. He'd forgotten the way her dark, blue-grey skin glistened strangely in the sunlight, colors glinting like a fish's scales. Though, the patches of white were almost pearlescent...

He could write a whole new journal entry on her now. Ford's had her categorized as a kelpie, but he'd never seen her take any equine form (apart from her ears)—no form other than this one, in fact (except for that brief stint as a human, but that wasn't her own doing). He had never even seen her whole body, come to think of it. Just her torso sticking out of the murky lake waters. He'd also never seen her drag travelers to the depths and devour their entrails, so that kind of dampened the kelpie theory. Clearly she was something else, a variant maybe, a different species of siren? It at least warranted further investigation.

"What are you looking at?"

"Uh—" he realized that he had been zoning out staring at her chest. Not that there was much of anything there, she was like a doll—wait, no, that was the wrong thought—he should be apologizing—

"Dipper Pines! Maybe you've grown up a little too much..."

"No, no! I didn't—I mean, sorry? I wasn't..." She was laughing, though. He couldn't help but feel that it was _at_ him.

"You're so funny. I can't wait to play with you again. Will you be here all summer?"

"That's the plan."


	2. Quiet Beginnings

"Really?! Oh, Dipper, that's amazing!"

"Haha, no, it's nothing, really," he crumpled bashfully under her effusive praise, rubbing the back of his neck.

"It's so exciting! A journal of your very own to explore the seeecrets of Gravity Falls..." A lilt in her words told him she was teasing him, which-- he was in a good enough mood-- he supposed he would overlook for now.

"Okay, it _is_ pretty exciting. I hope I can-- no, I'm _going_ to find secrets even Ford hasn't written about!" He was getting a little too excited despite himself. The thought of forging his own path into the mysteries, creating something that would inspire people like his uncle's journal had, getting to the bottom of the strangeness of Gravity Falls once and for all; it was enough to make him absolutely giddy with anticipation. It showed in the restlessness of his hands, flipping through the empty pages as if his eyes could already see the enigmas mapped out on the paper. Kells laughed quietly. He knew she was just humoring him, but once his research really began, she would see. She would see how important this was-- life-changing, maybe even world-changing.

"Well, let me know if I can help you on your mind-blowing adventures." Her spider-like hands traced a grandiose arc above her as she spoke. "I may not be too much assistance outside the water, but I pull some surprising strings around here..." He had known her long enough to understand that questioning that line would only lead to confusion and frustration. He also knew that the toothy grin she gave him meant it was designed to pique his curiosity.

It worked. A little. He would be lying if he said he wasn't already waiting for her to offer, though.

"Actually, Kells, you might be able to."

White hair dipped in and out of the water as she tilted her head at him, dragging leaves and debris with it. “Really?” Her voice was a little too surprised for someone who had just assured Dipper that she was capable of more than she seemed.

“I’ve, uh…” Oh boy. There was no way on Earth to make this any less of an awkward proposal. “I’ve been thinking—I mean—you know. Uh.” Why were her eyes so _huge_ , and why did they have to be so _focused_ on him? He tried not to look directly at her, like trying not to stare into the sun, but its heat beat down on him regardless. A shadow of his 12-year-old self crept over him, palms sweating, but he pushed it back. What was he doing? This wasn’t even that big of a deal, why was he so nervous?

“If you want to help, uh, I was thinking…” He paused. No, why did he pause? Why was he even doing this? This was a bad idea. “That you could be… the first entry.” The words came out stiff and uncomfortable, as he began to doubt that the question was even appropriate to ask. “Since—since I already know you. And all.” No, it was no use. It was a weird question no matter how he framed it. Who said she even wanted to be written down, or studied? He shouldn’t have brought it up, should have let it happen naturally if at all—

The squish of both her long hands on his cheeks startled him out of his nervousness.

“Dipper,” she stated seriously, eyes boring into his, “That. Would be. Incredible!” A wide grin split her face, an excited gasp, hands flying to her own faintly blushing cheeks as if she were a flattered schoolgirl rather than an otherworldly lake creature. As she spoke, he noted that there were two—no, three rows of teeth in her mouth. That… that escaped his notice before. “You—you really think I’m interesting enough to be in it? To be the first entry even—I—“ She began tugging her tangled locks of hair. “I don’t know, Dipper, I’m not that—“

"You are!" Okay, wow. That came out. Bad. That was not how he wanted to lead. "I mean, you're fascinating. If I remember right, you don't know where you came from?" Kells nodded, encouragingly enough for him to continue. "We could look into that! And that's just the beginning. Remember how we used to go over those old magic tomes?"

"And here I thought you'd forgotten about my pentagram lessons."

"Nope!" This time, it was his turn to crack a grin. "I tried to expand my research, but there's really nothing like having someone teach you who's been doing it for a couple years."

"A couple!" At her indignant exclamation, he laughed. "Try a couple hundred!"

"I know, I know," he raised his hands in defense, swirling his feet back and forth in the water below the dock. "But, seriously, Kells... I'm really interested in testing your limits. I get the feeling I haven't seen a fraction of what you've got up your sleeve."

"I don't have sleeves." She smirked. "But, your feeling is correct. I guess... even I've never pushed myself very far." Her black gaze wandered as she leaned back in the water, contemplating this. "Maybe I should have."

The statement felt a little too personal for Dipper to ask about or relate to. He looked down at his knees, shifting uncomfortably and causing ripples of water to interrupt the silence that had fallen between the two. Was it wrong of him to ask her this? Maybe he should have left well enough alone, gathered what data he could by himself.

"I want you to promise me something," she came out with suddenly, her head tilting sideways to make eye contact with her potential student.

"What?"

"If we're going to delve into my powers... my past... Dipper, you have to do as I say. I can't have you hurt because of some mistake I make. If I go too far, or uncover something that endangers you, if I tell you to turn around and never come back, I want you to do it."

"Haha, what? Kells, come on," he tried to lighten up her mood, but any more laughter he could have spared died in his throat under her stony gaze. "Leave and never come back? That won't happen. We can handle whatever comes our way, right?"

"I'm serious."

"Well, so am I!"

Kells straightened up, brow creased at his stubbornness. "Dipper—if you were hurt because of something I did, I don't... I don't know what I'd do." He heard the tremor in her voice: the infamous Kells waterworks, which he'd hoped to avoid during his stay. "Life here can be dangerous. If something happened, I would just... I would die. You know I care about you too much."

"I know," he sighed, feeling like he was answering his mother when she asked him to be home before 9. "Look, okay. If things get too dangerous, we'll call the whole thing off. I can start researching something else instead. Sound good?"

"Okay..." Kells eyed him warily, then wiped her eyes with the back of her palms, leaving him more than relieved to stop that leak before it started. He already saw more than enough tears from her years ago, when Bill would make his regular rounds, frequently tormenting the lake spirit in and out of dreams. Being magical enough to have to bother with him all the time must have really worn her down back then—with her aptitude for the unseen, she not only had to put up with him in the dreamscape, but whenever he had the spare time to drop by and play her insecurities like a piano. It had driven him crazy to see her so distressed that summer and unable to stop it. She was practically family, part and parcel of that weird makeshift home he and his sister had made. But, as usual, Bill tainted everything he touched. Including her.

His eyes settled on her, floating there, almost like a swimming person but for her absolutely alien appearance. Her eyes resembled the caricatures of little green men he'd seen on his road trip to Roswell, New Mexico: pitch black, almond-shaped and entirely too wide, impossibly devoid of light as if they devoured any sparks that drew too close. She blinked.

"What is it?"

"We should probably start with the basics." Good, thank god, he didn't stumble over that one. He needed to get his act together and stop zoning out. "Stuff like measurements, height and weight—" A shrill beeping interrupted him, bright white shining from his watch like a beacon. He turned his wrist to glimpse the time.

"Oh! Jeez—I'm gonna be late—" Shoving his shiny new journal back into his pack, he jumped up from his seat, grabbing his shoes in hand rather than shoving them awkwardly onto his wet feet. "I'll be back later, okay? Maybe tonight—probably tomorrow—"

"Huh? Already? Wait—" He was already off, but looked over his shoulder to see her waving a calculator at him. "You forgot your... thing! This button machine!"

"Just hold onto it! I'll get it later!"

The run back was a blur of anticipation and nervous energy. Considering the data he could gather, the secrets he could uncover, how impressed his great uncle would be when he was done, the stupid thorns that kept sticking in his feet and slowing him down—his mind raced wildly from one thought to the next as the pickup of his pulse carried over to his brain. Despite his effort, however, he was a tidy five minutes late. As he placed his shoes in the entryway, trying in vain to wipe the mud and dirt off his feet, he caught a quizzical look from his summertime mentor.

"Getting into trouble already? Even without your sister here?"

Dipper managed to give the weakest, most out-of-breath laugh he'd heard from himself in a while. "Well... you know how it is here."

"I do. Which means that from now on, if you're more than 15 minutes late and don't page me, I'm going to send a search party out for you."

"Page you? You mean text?"

"Er, same thing."

"Definitely not." It was much rarer now, but Ford's anachronisms were still amusing. Dipper had been relieved, when he arrived, to find that his conversations with his great uncle weren't quite as stilted or nerve-wracking as he'd anticipated; as much of a shut-in as he could be sometimes, he still cared about his great-nephew, and for all his warnings, he was just as eager to teach Dipper as Dipper was to learn.

"Did you run into anything that gave you trouble?" Ford's tone had shifted from joking to concerned, and he knew it was part of the reason the man had been reluctant to let him come back in the first place. Gravity Falls was dangerous. The two of them knew that better than most.

"No, no," Dipper reassured him, pulling his socks onto his clean(-ish) feet. "Nothing like that. Just... saw an old friend. Lost track of time, you know."

"Really?" His tone was all too suggestive. "I thought that lumberjack girl had already moved away..."

Dipper could have smacked his face into his palm. His family never wanted to let that go—not Mabel, definitely not Stan, and apparently not Ford, either. He didn't know if he could be any sicker of hearing about that particular failure of so many years ago.

"She did, Uncle Ford, I visited her in Portland before we came here. And just because I lost track of time doesn't mean I was even with a girl, come on. I have plenty of... uh, guy friends... around here."

"Alright, alright, I believe you." Ford grinned at him, clearly not believing the story at all. "I'm not about to grill you when we have work to do instead—here, put this on."

Dipper took the white coat hanging from his uncle's arm, feeling a certain finality to the action of threading his arms through the sleeves. This was it—he was really, finally here to help Ford with his research, after so many summers and school days spent fervently wishing. They would be an unstoppable team, reaching through the veil of weirdness to grab the truth hidden within it all!

However, as it so often did, reality did not live up to his expectation. He spent much of the day handing Ford the necessary tools for experiments and fetching him new cans of energy drinks (his discovery of them after 30 years' absence had resulted in an addiction that even outpaced his need for coffee), and writing down data that he dictated offhandedly while his mind was solely focused on his work. This wasn't so bad, as his work was admittedly fascinating to Dipper, and it was a privilege just to watch—but being so close, he certainly thought he would be getting more hands-on experience. Well... maybe later. And there was still his own project, wasn't there?

Once the full moon was risen in the sky, and he was doing some math of his own while looking over their data for the day, he reached for his calculator—only to feel his hand close on thin air. Right—he'd forgotten it with Kells. He could grab it and be back to finish these last few equations in... maybe half an hour. It wouldn't be long. And it'd be a nice, quick stretch for his stiff legs.

The dock creaked under his weight as he made his way to its end. He didn't even need a flashlight—the light of the moon bathed the lake in an eerie, serene glow. "Kells?"

There were a few moments of silence before a bubbling in the water, then the creature broke the surface, rubbing her eyes sleepily. "'lo," she murmured, clearly half-conscious.

"Sorry—were you sleeping?"

She nodded. "S'okay. What do you need, little one?"

That chafed a bit. She still treated him like a twelve-year-old. He was nineteen, for crying out loud—far beyond the name "little one". Chalking it up to her sleepiness, however, he decided to just move on for now.

"I left my calculator here, remember? I just need that back."

"Cal... cu... what?"

"Oh, the, uh. Button machine."

"Oh! Yes, yes, I remember. I will get it, one moment." She disappeared under the water. Oh... no. She didn't—she wouldn't have—

Just as he feared, she resurfaced with a waterlogged, hundred-dollar calculator. Well. It certainly wasn't worth a hundred dollars anymore. As she held it out to him, smiling obliviously, a small waterfall fell from the seam in its side. He should have expected this.

"Thanks... Kells..." The calculator leaked a good half-cup of water when he turned it. He was chalking this one up as a total loss, unable to help putting his forehead in his palm.

"Dipper, are you crying? Don't cry." She yawned. "It's only a... calkinator. Thing. I can keep all kinds of things safe for you if you want." And there it went—over her head, as usual. He couldn't be angry. He reminded himself of this while trying not to groan in resignation.

"I know, Kells. You're very reliable." _As in, I can always rely on you to break any technology you touch._

She giggled. "Why, thank you. And you're very sweet." No, he couldn't be mad at this moonlit, smiling little alien. She was like a child. And _he_ was the one being called "little one".

"Goodnight, Dipper Pines." She rose from the water, startling him from the small, silent funeral he was holding for his deceased calculator. He didn't even know she had a body below her chest—well, come on, he figured, but he'd never—her legs were so long—too long, way too long, bent the wrong way—it was like she was made of patched skin stretched over toothpicks, so emaciated as to be completely inhuman, even the suggestion of her silhouette in the night had him desperately stifling a scream in his throat—and she leaned down, lifting his hat and planting a kiss on his forehead.

"There. Now you will have sweet dreams." Her long finger tapped his nose. "Magic."

"Right," his voice was hoarse, barely able to squeak out an answer to the nightmare fuel before him. Sweet dreams... maybe not. But she was gone in the next blink of his eye—form turned to water that splashed over his shoes, back to the bottom of the lake where she dwelled, leaving him reeling in her wake.

Tall. Too tall. Maybe "little one" was the right name for him after all.


	3. That Fragile Capricorn

It was still... quiet. Unnaturally so. But she didn't seem to mind, so neither did he—pointing out configurations of the stars to one another, time stood still on the lakeshore where they were perched. Though the sun had gone down it was still warm, the air between them sticky and uncomfortable. Her legs stretched out in the sand next to him and his eyes dwelled on them unabashedly, long and dark with light patches scattered over them like leaves on a dirt path. They were... pretty. They were. And he told her so.

She laughed, a lock of hair in her fingers and a tinge of nervousness to her voice. A slight sigh, a little sway, she was leaning on his shoulder. His heart leapt. Was that cliché? Absolutely. But he put his arm around her small frame anyway.

He could get used to this.

Her hand traced the lines between colorful planets and stars in the sky above them, brightly shining and illuminating the two of them in a spectrum of soft color.

"Watch," she said.

Her lithe fingers clasped together. When they parted, a web of water weaved between them, like a spider's work in the dewy morning. The drops seeped together to form shapes beneath her watchful, empty eyes: an angel, a pyramid, a tree, a star. The number two. It flickered to three like a glitched display, the droplets melted, slipping through her fingers. Hurriedly she tried to catch them, her hands grabbing for them in the damp sand—but he placed his hands over hers.

"It's okay."

For the first time he could take in her face. A tremor shook them both. Her tears were lit up by the starlight. Cyan, pink, then purple, she closed her eyes.

And he opened his.

The roof of the shack stared back down at him. Though he'd pinned a curtain over the window, morning sunlight still seeped in behind it—couldn't be later than nine. His blanket had tangled around his limbs in a fantastic fashion while he'd slept, ensuring that he was being cooked thoroughly in his sleep, and he knocked over several books and papers he'd left lying on his bed when he tried to extract himself from the knots. Comfortable. He wouldn't be getting back to sleep anytime soon.

Giving little care to the papers he mussed on his way out of bed, he stumbled to his feet, peeling the clothes off his skin where they'd become stuck with sweat. Very comfortable. He needed a shower.

It wasn't until he was watching the water fall from the faucet that he remembered. Right... what a weird dream. It was Kells, wasn't it? Or... someone like her. The girl in his dream had a normal human body, and as he well knew at this point, Kells' form was far from normal. About as far from it as he could imagine.

On that note, today was the day they started, wasn’t it? He would be getting a good look at her once and for all, no more nightmarish surprises in the night—hopefully, a little sunlight would make her a tad less reminiscent of another slender urban legend.

Height, weight, length of arms and legs, length of fingers... he strung a mental list of measurements together as he showered, humming "Disco Girl" under his breath. It was a forever classic. Let's see... tooth length, definitely... maybe he could borrow some equipment from Ford to gauge bite pressure later. The size of her ears, maybe... her eyes, bust, waist, hips... um, wait. Not that.

Nooot that. Not her lips, or her... thighs...

"Okay, that's enough," he asserted, straightening himself up and placing a firm fist on the shower wall. "What _is_ this?" He continued muttering to no one in particular as the water fell in cascades around him. What was he... doing? What was he even thinking? Kells had always been like a sister to him. Not a... romantic interest. Ew, that felt weird to say. It made them seem like characters in a sitcom. No, no, this was definitely not a sitcom situation. Guy leaves town for seven years, comes back, realizes he thinks of a childhood friend in a sometimes more-than-friendly way. Oh... no. That _was_ a sitcom situation.

This was trouble.

He turned off the water, stepping out to towel himself dry. How was he supposed to approach this?! Putting aside the obvious fact that he couldn't _date_ a friend like her, as if she would even want to, date him that is-- he was still just a kid to her-- _putting that aside_ , they weren't the same... species, he didn't even know if she had...

No. That was far enough. Clearly, the best way to deal with this was by...

"...Acting like nothing is wrong." The toothbrush in his mouth ceased his mutterings, but his mind was still racing a hundred miles a minute. Today would be... interesting. Maybe he should call it off. And avoid the lake. From now on. Forever. Okay, no, that wasn't a solution. He liked hanging out with Kells, even when she inadvertently flooded his valuable equipment. Besides, maybe... with Bill out of the picture, maybe he did have a chance...

He had to wonder where these thoughts were coming from. He liked Kells, she had always been a good friend to him, and he was always intrigued by her—she was a mysterious entity with powers and past shrouded in shadow. But this? This was a whole new dimension, an entirely different monster. He’d never even considered this before.

…Probably.

Rinsing his toothbrush off, he sighed. He couldn't avoid her, even if he wanted to. He'd already committed to studying her, and that was what he aimed to do, whatever unsettling emotions were trying to get in the way. He would just have to ignore them and carry on. Nothing was different, nothing would change, unless he let it.

It didn't take him long to shrug on some clothes, pull on his sandals. He would get a good three, maybe four hours with Kells before he had to report to Ford, and he had to make sure there was enough to occupy the both of them in that time—the last thing he wanted was to be alone with her with no plan or ideas of what to say. A tape measure, backup ruler, notebook, pen, extra pen, some scratch paper, a deck of cards, all placed into his backpack for easy carry. Maybe he should take the travel chess set? He shoved it into his bag too. Just to be safe.

As the sun continued its climb into the sky and he pushed his way through the underbrush, he wondered for the umpteenth time if he should be doing this. There were plenty of reasons not to, but against the massive weight of his curiosity, they didn’t quite measure up. Fortunately, he didn’t have much time to dwell on it—as soon as he set foot on the dock, he saw a pair of black, equine ears sticking out of the water. Her watery eyes soon bobbed to the surface as well, watching him with her eyebrows knitted in painful concern. Was she crying already? What did he do?

"...What?" he asked, tilting his head as he set his pack on the gently bobbing wood. The only response he got was a gurgle of bubbles in the form of what he thought was two syllables. Knowing her, it was probably his name she spoke into the water.

"Come on... You know I can't understand you when you do that."

Finally she hoisted her lips above water to talk to him properly. She _was_ crying, after all. What had happened between last night and now?

"Dipper, I'm... I'm sorry..."

"Why?" She hadn't realized that she ruined his calculator, had she?

"I'm sorry!" She covered her face with her long fingers. "I-I shouldn't have... Last night, I scared you, didn't I? I know--! I'm scary, it's why I never... showed myself to you when you were younger... Ohh, I should never have done that..." Moaning miserably, she started sinking into her shame once more. And into the lake as well.

"Kells, Kells—" Dipper tried to reach out to her, but she was a little too far away. "Shh, don't cry, okay? I'm not scared. If I was, would I be here right now?" He attempted an encouraging smile—it was a little weak, given that he _was_ horrified the previous night, but by the way her glittering eyes looked up at him, it seemed to work.

"No, I guess... not..." The water dweller tentatively waded closer. "You're really... not afraid of me?"

"Of course not," Dipper laughed faintly, flicking her hopeful ear, "You're my friend, Kells. I could never be afraid of you." She smiled bashfully—it felt a bit like she'd kindled a fire in his open ribcage. Weird. But not bad.

"Thank you, Dipper. You're too kind."

"Haha, well, I don't kn—" As he leaned back again nervously he somehow lost his hold on the dock. His equilibrium was thrown before he could finish his sentence and before he knew it his body broke the surface of the lake, eyes screwed shut and breath barely held for the inevitable impact that... didn't come.

"Gotcha," her voice was next to his ear, low and trying to comfort. "Well—some of you... sorry, you still got wet." Something soft, thin, too thin, rested behind him, propping him up with an occasional nudge under the water. "But I saved your hat, and your fluffy hair. Hehe." He felt it. He felt the warmth of her laugh bubble through her, the rise and fall of her breath, her outline against his back, this was too much, he had to get away right now—

Luckily, she hoisted him back onto the dock before he had time to fly into a panic.

"Sorry—Sorry about that, I, um—"

"Why? It was an accident." She smiled obliviously at him, wiping away the remainder of the tears on her cheeks. Was it an accident? Had he somehow done that on purpose? Purposefully because he knew she would catch him? But if he was questioning himself, he couldn't have done it purposefully, maybe subconsciously— he still needed to do research on how to change subconscious impulses—

"Dipper," Kells snapped him out of his endless loop with a wave of her hand before his eyes. "Are you home? What are you thinking about, silly?"

"Uh—nothing—"

"You're a very bad liar." Her smile turned sharper as she interrupted, a little more teeth to it. "But I like that."

"...Thanks...?" he sighed, exhausted already. Not even half an hour had passed. Maybe he just needed to get to work—that would keep his mind off... things.

"You're welcome. I don't mind telling you things I like about you." Kells floated on her back as his damp hands dug into the bag for the journal and tape measure. He tried to tune out her rambling while he began scribbling a few preemptive tables to keep data with, but to little avail. "Like... when you do that clicky thing, with your... pen? That's so funny. It means you're thinking hard. I can tell, you're very bad at hiding your feelings, which is another thing I like. You're bad at hiding things, and I'm _very_ good at humans."

"What does that mean?"

"Uh—mm—just... you know, humans are easy for me."

"Easy?" Sometimes, her grasp of the English language still left something to be desired. Or maybe she was being vague on purpose. He was beginning to lean towards the latter.

"Yes, that's right." On purpose it is.

Great. So he was easy. Why didn't he just wear a sandwich sign with his thoughts and feelings on it? Make it _easier_ for her. Kells, however, was staring at the wide blue sky, and didn't notice his annoyance.

"But it's cute." Her simple words conjured a blush in his cheeks, which he urgently wished away.

"Humans are?"

"No, you."                    

His pen stopped. His cheeks were burning. He didn't dare move his eyes from the page, but heard the water part for her movement closer.

"Look at you! Look!" She teased him, giggling mercilessly. "You're so embarrassed! Oh, that's precious! Little Dipper—" Her spidery fingers pinched his cheek, which he smacked away.

"Quit it!" There was a flash of anger in his voice—he suddenly and desperately hated the way she was talking to him, like she was cooing over a baby, and he also hated himself for the painful disappointment he felt at her tone. He shouldn't have hoped for a second that she would think of him in any way other than eternally twelve years old. Time stood still for her, in every way imaginable.

Her hand closed over thin air, moving slowly to her chest. Part of his anger gave way to regret. But not all of it.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Dipper," she spoke quietly, drifting closer to the dockside in hopes that he might look at her, but his eyes remained on his journal. Long, black fingers curled over the edge. "I didn't mean to..."

"Hm."

"Okay. I did. But it was wrong of me. Listen..." Her head rested on the wood, persistence rewarding her with a glance from the corner of his eye. A cautious little smile sprouted on her lips as she continued. "I like you when you're frustrated too."

He couldn't help but roll his eyes with a skeptical scoff. "You think it's cute."

"Yes." He cast a scowl at her. "But I think you look handsome when you're angry."

This was a surprise—he looked away, hand covering his mouth, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks as an attempted distraction. It didn't work.

"That's kind of messed up."

"You may find that I'm just a messed up person."

He still couldn't look at her—his free hand absently colored a corner block of the table in black ink.

"I don't think so."

"You don't?"

"I think you're... just fine."

"Really?"

"Yeah." He managed to peel his eyes from the page, tossing her a halfway apologetic smile. "Well, not _just_ fine. You’re also really weird."

"Haha! But you like weird things. So that doesn't sound so bad."

This wasn't flirting. Her crossed arms on the dock and the tilted head that rested on them, her smile pushing her cheek against the back of her hand, the eyes watching him—not flirting! Not at all. This was friendly banter. Clearly. What Mabel would say flashed into his mind, and he took great pains to think the exact opposite.

"So, uh..." He cleared his throat when his voice cracked, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "Are you—are you ready to start?"

"Start...?" The blank look she gave him had his heart fall to the floor. "Oh! Yes!" There it was, back in his throat. "What is on the itinerary? Measurements? Physical endurance tests? Blood rituals, orphan sacrifice?"

"Juuust the first one. Maybe we'll get to the others next week." He grinned, her laughter ringing in his ears. "But... Kells, you can't come out of the water, can you?"

"No..." She straightened up, moving her frail arms back into the water. "But I can stand on it. You'll have to measure in the water, I'm afraid."

"And that's why I wore sandals."

"Oho, always planning ahead! That's my little constellation."

He didn't mind 'little' so much when it was part of that nickname.

"Uh, Dipper..."

"Hm?"

"You're... You're sure this is okay? You won't be... scared? I'm... kind of big, compared to humans..."

"Kells, please. I'm a professional." His faux-cocky tone coaxed another laugh from her, hopefully shaking away her anxiety over the situation. They moved to the shallows and Dipper sat on the shore, rolling his pants legs up to his calves. After a few more cautious questions from the water spirit and an equal amount of reassurances, Kells finally nodded with a resigned sigh.

He stood with pen and notebook in hand, water sloshing around his ankles as she rose, and rose... and rose... It was unnatural how she came up from the shallows—that amount of water wasn't able to cover all... eight, nine feet of her body? His head tilted back to look at her fully. Her spine hunched over to see him, arms crossed self-consciously and white, wildly tangled hair in a curtain around her face.

But, really... she wasn't that frightening in the light. She was so frail; it looked like a rogue breeze could break her in half. Her arms and fingers were spindly enough, but her legs must have been made of toothpicks, shaped like wildly crooked lightning bolts and ending in hooves. Hooves facing... backwards? That was old kelpie lore. No matter what form they took, they could always be found out by their backwards hooves and the kelp tangled in their hair.

Okay, so... those fit. They fit quite a bit. Maybe she was some kind of kelpie, but there were too many puzzle pieces that didn't play well with the rest: for one, kelpies were traditionally male, and... well, he'd never actually asked Kells her gender... did she even have one? There didn't seem to be much of anything by way of secondary sexual characteristics. His hand scribbled notes in the margins of his journal to research later, mind too distracted to realize that the question he was asking could have been construed as rude.

"Kells, are you a girl?"

She tilted her head.

"I... I don't know. What makes a girl?"

"Well... hm." He looked up, ill-prepared to give a lecture on gender politics to a lake spirit. "Do you feel like one?"

"Your sister always said that the time we spent together was 'girl time'. I guess... that makes me a girl?"

Maybe the entire concept of gender was a tad outside her purview.

"You don't mind when people call you 'her'?"

"No. I don't mind."

"What about 'he'?"

"Um... I don't get called that very often. It feels different, but I don't have a preference."

"Noted. Do you mind if I keep calling you 'she' and 'her'?"

"That's fine. Whatever you want to call me, Dipper." He tried his best to ignore the fondness in her voice as she said that. This was business. His thumb clicked the pen once. Twice.

"Okay—let's straighten up. Stand up tall, Kells," he instructed her, like a parent might tell a child whose height they were marking on the wall. Obediently, she cooperated.

"Hold this up to the top of your head." He handed her the end of the tape measure, and she did as instructed. "Let's see... nine and... ten point... six three inches." His pen scrawled across the paper, converting the measurement into metric for easier calculations later. "You're almost ten feet tall. That's... haha, that's really tall, Kells, wow."

"Is that good?"

"Haha! Sure, it's great—you can reach all kinds of things on high shelves." She looked delighted, which he considered plenty reward for his work. Moving from limb to limb and taking measurements on each, Dipper orbited around her like a moon to a planet, wading back and forth in the water. He would have to come back later with ink to get prints of her hooves, but for now, the measurements would do.

God, it was hot. Even with the water evaporating off his clothes from his earlier misadventure, he was beginning to sweat through his t-shirt within ten minutes of moving around. The air near the lake was always humid, making the heat nearly unbearable. He adjusted his cap, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand before scribbling down a few more digits.

"Dipper, are you okay? You look warm..."

"Huh? No, no, I'm fine."

"We could go for a swim. I haven't swum around with you since you were a tiny thing," she smiled warmly, "Remember when I used to pull you and your sister around on a raft?"

"Oh, I remember. You used to get some pretty high speeds out here..."

"You must be done with your notes by now. Don't you have a little time?"

"I-I don't know..." He checked his watch—an hour before he absolutely had to head back. Plenty of time for a dip, just like she wanted, but swimming was not on his agenda. Somehow, in his morning contemplations, he hadn't anticipated this at all. He should have. He should have packed what he needed.

"Are... Are you sure you don't want to, maybe, play some chess instead?" he asked with a nervous laugh. She'd melted back into the water, her expectant black gaze staring up at him.

"How will that cool you off? You're too warm. Come on, you already got wet earlier, what harm would it do?" Her hands reached out, taking his, and pulled him a couple steps further into the water as it sloshed around his knees.

What harm? What harm?! He looked out over the lake like it was a minefield. He didn't prepare for this. What if he managed to find leeches? What if she thought he looked weird without a shirt? What if a fish or a piece of kelp touched his foot and it felt like an eel or a hand grabbing him and he screamed, she would laugh and he would be totally humiliated, he'd have to never come back again, or god forbid what if she brushed against him the wrong way—

"Dipper Pines! You are thinking too much about something, and you are going to die of heat stroke and indecision!"

"That's a little dramatic—" Her arm tugged his again, and he stumbled, almost tripping over his own feet. "Kells!"

"Cooome ooon!" Her sing-song voice moved him a step closer. "Just a little—more!" With a final tug, she pulled him over, and he felt a pair of hands wrap around his torso—then water rushing around him. This was it. This was it! She was pulling him to the bottom of the lake and she would eat him and that would be the last anyone saw of Dipper Pines.

But he broke the surface again, his friend's mischievous and sharp-toothed grin facing him as the lake water dripped down both their faces.

"Not so bad, is it?"

"That's my—" He made a grab for the blue and white hat that sat askew on her head, but she swiftly dodged him. "Kells! You're being—"

"—Unbearable!" she finished his sentence, laughing as he splashed her vengefully. He couldn't help but laugh, himself, her childish playfulness beginning to drown out his fears. "Help! Help! I'm being drowned!"

"Oh, I'll show you drowning—"

"If you think you can catch me!" She stayed maddeningly out of reach, his swimming ability unable to measure up even slightly to her ease in the water. Teasing him across the lake, before he knew it, they were in the shade of a rocky outcropping far from where they'd started. Vines drooped over their view of the lake, water quiet and cool around them, and she finally plopped his hat back on his head, where it belonged.

"Not so bad, is it?" she repeated with a gentler smile.


	4. Carousel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A thousand thanks to [exaltedrebellion](http://exaltedrebellion.tumblr.com), for the beautiful art of Kells! I so love and deeply appreciate your support!

 

* * *

 

He was still dripping when he returned to the shack. Though he'd anticipated having to dodge Ford's questions when he entered the cluttered house, the top floor seemed deserted—his great uncle must have been on a lower level. Probably better that way. He had a few minutes to switch into some dry clothes and pretend he'd been sleeping in rather than goofing off in the Gravity Falls lake with an otherworldly creature.

The conversation they'd had beneath the shade of that overhang stuck in his mind all day long: words that hovered in the back of his head while he made amiable conversation with his uncle, ghosts of her voice lingering as the two of them pored over tomes of research.

"I thought about what you said."

"What did I say?"

"About how you haven't seen what I can really do," she told him, her fingertips drawing circles in the water's surface. "I can show you. Or... I can try. Do you remember the three days I spent as a human, when you were here that summer?"

How could he forget? Actually, he still had the Pterodactyl Bros t-shirt that he'd let her wear while she slept tucked away in his and Mabel's shared room. That human form wasn't her magic, though. That... was the result of a very bad decision on her part, and a worse one on his to let her go through with it.

"I'm not as powerful as Bill is," she'd continued, "But I want to try again. Before, I was afraid to try it myself... I've practiced since then. I think... I think I could do it."

"What? Are you sure... No, I don't think that's a good idea." Not only was she completely ignorant of the finer points of human life, and he would have to once again play babysitter to her, Dipper was well aware of how badly a transformation spell could backfire. He... may have done research. "Kells, I don't want you to put yourself in danger just for the sake of my journal. I already know you can do plenty of impressive things."

"It isn't for that." Her words were quiet. Eyes gazed straight downward, into the dark, murky waters beneath her. "If you... don't think it's a good idea, then I won't try," she smiled then, as if she could skate so easily from her unsettling words to complete agreement. He felt that the conversation was far from over, but she'd already started asking about what other magic she could show him, and somehow managed to babble her way through to his wave goodbye.

_"It isn't for that."_ The memory wouldn't leave him alone. It cropped up when he was barely surviving Ford's badly-cooked meal, when he smuggled takeout through the back door, when he was plumbing the depths of the internet for gender-apathetic kelpie mythology, when he found himself lost in YouTube hell by way of the cat videos Mabel kept relentlessly IMing him.

He heaved a sigh, his head thunking against the wall behind him. What _else_ would it be for?

...Not that.

A glance at the clock told him it was far too late for him to be awake. 4:36 was emblazoned on the back of his eyelids. Hands ran through his hair, tugging in exasperation at the roots as if he could pull the meaning from somewhere within his curly brown locks. He should know better. Kells had always been perfectly wonderful at dropping maddening comments that had him wondering for days.

She'd also been perfectly wonderful at giving cryptic and sometimes arcane advice. And making him laugh when it was the last thing he wanted to do. His mind drifted back to that easy summer: the flower chains she'd made for him with a beaming Mabel at her side, the times she'd pulled him away from the waterfalls' undertow before it had even the chance to drag him under, the little baubles and blessings she made for the siblings, unique each, careful not to offend his fragile twelve-year-old masculinity while also catering to Mabel's love of the shiny and shimmery. Things he was only able to appreciate in retrospect, wishing he could return there.

The moments she had placed herself firmly between he and Bill. The only times she had raised her voice, water boiling around her, that if he laid a hand on these children he would forever regret it. His mocking laughter crossing dimensions, eternally amused by her petty, humanoid emotions, her winces of pain as invisible hands tugged out the knots in her hair. The moments Dipper had come upon her speaking to thin air in whispered words, only to have silence respond back to her in kind. A laugh. Different from the ones that bubbled up from her lips before. He wished that he had put the pieces together then, and saved himself so much heartache.

Heartache... is that what it was? The word felt like an unwelcome revelation. But that... that was because he was worried for her. She was signing her own death warrant, hanging around with a demon like that—he didn't like it, and he made no secret of it. Had there... been something else to it, after all? Years of telling himself it was never jealousy, not for a second anything but concern for a good friend and frustration at her refusal to listen to reason, seven years' worth of excuses just to fall apart when he finally made it back to Gravity Falls.

He shoved his pillow into his face to stifle the thoughts. He wasn't prepared to accept it, just like that. As far as he was concerned, his crush on Kells would pass within the month, and it would be back to business as usual...

Oh, god. It _was_ a crush. He had the distinct feeling, as he sighed into his pillow, that he had been born doomed, and would die that way.

Another week passed without incident. Try as he might to bring her earlier words up, she artfully dodged the tenderest touches to turn the conversation around, interrupting him with magical little parlor tricks (he had yet to decode the science behind most of them) and enthusiastic questions far from the topic of human transformation. There were times when he would open his mouth to ask a question, only to see her staring into the middle distance, after an owl taking midday flight or a breeze that pulled petals from a flower. Those were the moments he felt that no matter how many notes he took, how many of her spells and symbols he decoded, he would never begin to fathom the depths of her being. There would always be a part of her that remained hidden, just out of sight.

"Do you want to see where I live?" she'd asked one evening, smiling blithely at him as if she'd just invited him for a cup of tea.

"You mean... under the water?" He looked up from his phone, where he had been relaying messages from Mabel to her old friend. "Uh, no offense, but drowning wasn't really on my to-do list..."

She elbowed him, a motion learned from his sister's influence in that summer so long ago. "Dipper, please. I'm a _professional_." Her sharp teeth showed just barely beneath her slate grey lips. "Of course you won't be drowning on my watch. I have just the thing... if you want to, that is."

Ford had given him the day off, and he'd spent most of it cooped up in the attic with stacks of papers and broken pens, his own research beginning to blur together with his uncle's by the time he finally decided to take a break. Taking an underwater excursion sounded like a welcome relief—even if he had no idea how she planned to keep him alive for it.

"Okay," he consented, shrugging as he slipped his cell phone back in his bag. Her eyes lit up, clearly thrilled at the thought of their expedition.

"Oh, this will be so fun! You'll love it, Dipper. It will be like a dream for you." She clapped her hands together in delight. "Literally. Hehe. Lie down, now, and I need your head right here..." Instructing him gently, she guided his head to the middle of the chalk-drawn pentagram where she'd been practicing for him earlier, then wiped the crystals from the five points and replaced them with new colors he hadn't seen before. As he turned his head to watch her work and stared up at her focused expression, she murmured unintelligibly to herself, and placed two different pieces of greenery on either side of him. The ritualistic nature of it all had him a little uneasy.

"A-are you sure about this?" He mumbled, a crack in his voice as his dark brown eyes watched her expression—she switched easily from a concentrated stare to a soothing smile.

"Don't worry, my little constellation. It won't hurt a bit." He hadn't said anything about it hurting. He fidgeted, suddenly quite uncomfortable with lying back on the wooden dock. Kells noticed his squirming and sighed.

"Dipper Pines. This will only work if you're relaxed enough. Listen—" she hovered over him, leaning in close to murmur quietly in his ear. Though his cheeks were hot, and her breath as she spoke tickled his neck, he did his best to hold still. Her voice was... soothing, somehow. It made his eyelids heavy. "It will be as a dream. I will coax you into slumber, and once there, you will be able to follow me underwater in the other plane. I can even give you a limited corporeal form, if you ask very nicely." He felt a sleepy chuckle in his chest.

"Yeah... mmkay. I trust you, Kells."

"I know." The smile in her voice reached his ears, coaxing out a weak one of his own as he felt her fingers pull the hair away from his forehead. He didn't know why she was so fond of his old birth mark... just a bunch of weird freckles... Her thumb pressed softly against it, wet with lake water, like some kind of arcane and half-conscious baptism as she murmured verses he couldn't understand.

In a moment he was looking down at himself. It was only the second time this had happened, and it wasn't any less jarring than the first to know that his body was there, but technically he wasn't in it.

"There you are," she said with a smile, her voice still as gentle as when she'd whispered to him, "now follow me. You'll only remain this way for twenty minutes."

Her long, spidery fingers reached out towards his spirit, and when he placed his hand in hers it felt strangely realer than when he was awake: he could... feel her, somehow, cool and soothing in his palm like a cupped handful of spring water.

She pulled him under in the next moment—it was a strange feeling to move through the water, but not disturb it, not so much as a breeze in his hair as they sank swiftly to the bottom. She guided him to an ancient-looking, ratty blanket that had been fixed over the side of a boulder.

"This is it?"

"Yes, that's right. Here..." Her fingers pulled back the curtain. It wasn't a boulder at all, it was... it was a geode. Crystals sparkled from the ceiling to the floor, where a long, flat stone had been placed as a makeshift bed, several tattered and faded blankets as well as a lumpy pillow tossed over it carelessly. The crystals on the walls were all but covered in knick-knacks: shelves upon shelves of plants, stones, various vials containing ingredients he could only imagine, runic carvings in pebbles scattered amidst the bric-a-brac. He was sure it was all a hectic organization that only she could decipher.

"I hope it's not... too messy..." Her voice echoed behind him, and he looked back to see her floating shyly near the entrance, messy and tangled hair looking very nearly angelic as it floated around her face.

"It's great, Kells," he replied with an encouraging smile, "Do you mind if I look at some of this stuff up close?"

"Of course—here..." Her thin frame drifted over to him, hands running lightly from his shoulders to his fingertips. "You can look at whatever you like." His own hands and arms now felt the water around them, the gentle resistance it offered with each movement—he guessed that she'd given him that limited corporeality she mentioned earlier. He went straight to the nearest shelf to take mental inventory of her crafts, determined to make a half-decent sketch of them once he got back to the surface.

Covered by a spider's web of intricately braided threads, he almost didn't see it at first—but the ancient chest next to her bed, dilapidated and in desperate need of retirement, begged exploration. As he turned to it, she placed a hand on its lid, offering an apologetic smile.

"That only holds my sentimental things... I would rather not explain them to you. Trust me—it would only bore you."

Strange. Not the strangest thing he'd heard her say, but...

"Look, look," she took the hand that had wanted to open the chest, guiding him to the other side of her abode and opening a similarly old chest. It was filled to the brim with colorful pebbles, stones, and crystals—maybe a few gems? There were rings and jewelry Dipper was sure she'd picked up from tourists. The only question there was whether she'd picked them from the lake floor or from the edge of their boats.

"Aren't they lovely? The little round stones are perfect for wards, because you can tuck them in a tiny corner..."

She gave him the tour of her small, one-room home, detailing each trinket and spell she'd made, gathering a small handful of things she wanted to give to him while she was at it. Her hand stayed in his the whole time, guiding him gently here and there, and it seemed that the time he had to stay passed through their fingers like sand.

"Hmm... I think it's almost time." Kells took a small pouch of ingredients in hand, releasing his. "I need to go back up, to prepare you. You can take another look around—but don't panic when you start feeling hazy. It just means you're waking up." A quick smile and a flash of white hair, and he was alone in her small cubby, floating awkwardly with no idea what to occupy himself with.

Of course he wanted to respect her privacy. She would feel undoubtedly betrayed if he looked in that chest of "sentimental things", if that really _was_ what was in there... Wait, what was he thinking? Of course it was. Why would she lie to him? It probably was just some trinkets from her various beaux over the years, anyway, and he didn't want or expect her to explain any of it...

He drifted closer to the chest.

One little peek couldn't hurt, right? She wouldn't know—he could put it all back just the way it was before he had even been there. He would only find some silly old gifts she'd received, and be done with it. He didn't plan on asking her about the ghosts of heartache past.

The faint sensation that this could only end badly rushed through him as he opened the heavy lid, but it was quickly extinguished by the first thing he saw.

A string of bright orange, laminated carefully, brought a smile to his face. This was... these were the tickets she had won at the local arcade, when he and Mabel showed her around town on her first day as a temporary human. Mabel had the good sense to have them laminated, so that she could hang on to them forever as a memento. See, he told himself, this really was just a box of old memories that she wanted to keep safe.

Black cloth... a bowtie. Clip-on? Who had worn this?

Oh, this was a scarf Mabel had knitted her, blue and green zig-zag stripes. With plenty of added glitter. There was quite a bit still lingering, even underwater all this time. Even the glittery little plastic comb his sister had once used to brush Kells' unruly hair was here. Of course it was; clearly she hadn't actually been using it all this time.

A rubber ball, with colored dye inside. A strange, prismatic crystal, cut in the shape of a flower, pulsing with some kind of faint power he could hardly understand or describe.

Some kind of smooth sphere, a stone he didn't recognize, he pulled it out to examine it closer—and nearly dropped it when he realized what it was.

Light. Small. This... he couldn't believe it. He was hallucinating. There was no way...

His hand swayed, a dizziness sweeping over him. No, no no no no no, not now, he had to put this back. She couldn't know. He placed it gently back where it was, god only knew what might happen if he broke it, and slammed down the lid of the chest, trying to remember where exactly all these interlaced threads were before he'd moved them—he took a mental picture beforehand, but he couldn't—remember it now—

"Back in the world of the living?" His eyes opened, and he felt a strong, warm wind blow over him as he stared into the pitch black eyes of his former spirit guide.

"Uh... did... did I leave it?"

She smiled faintly. "No, silly. But I'm glad you're awake. A storm is coming, so you should run on home now. It won't be safe out here for much longer."

As he sat up, he wasn't sure if the dizziness he felt was a result of his slumber or residual from her spell. Or... from what he saw.

"Dipper," she'd grasped his hand before he knew it, clasping it in both her own. "Be careful on your way back. And... I'm glad. I'm glad that you trust me. Please... continue to."

Cool, damp fingers brought his knuckles to her lips, bestowing the gentlest kiss he could have imagined, a warmth lingering beneath his skin where she touched. He nodded dumbly. With a weak smile, she released him, diving beneath the surface as another strong breeze whipped the lake into waves.

He gathered his things. Stumbled to his feet, willed himself forward and away from Gravity Falls Lake. Why... in that box of sweet little mementos...

Why did she have a human skull?


	5. Shelter

"Okay, Dipper. Let's think logically about this—we can't jump to conclusions." Pacing back and forth with a pen and pad of paper, he'd already prepared himself on the way back to list possible reasons she could have a human skull, a human skull of all things, hanging around her room, why she had tried to keep it from him—because clearly, that was her intention when she asked him not to look. A list. It would help. He could prove to himself that there were lots of reasons she could have a skull in her box of "sentimental things". Reasons that didn't include serial killings.

First—okay, maybe she had just found it! No one said she had anything to do with that person's death. Maybe she found it and liked it. Maybe it was fake. Maybe it was a gift from another kid she'd befriended along the way, and it was just a realistic replica, not real at all. If he was freaking out like this over a fake skull, it would serve him right for looking where she had asked him so sweetly not to.

The storm crept in on silent feet while he babbled to himself, scribbling on the paper in hopes it would banish his deepest fear. The clouds snuck up on the evening, swallowing the sun in darkness before it made it to the safety of the horizon, and began their work in the way most water torture did: with small, slow drops.

Maybe it was just some bizarre gift Bill had given her. Once he had tried to give Dipper a screaming head. It would make sense. It could belong to someone who had done her wrong. He didn't have anything to worry about in that case, of course! Of course... unless she found out that he'd betrayed her trust by sticking his nose where it didn't belong.

Or maybe it was the skull of the last boy she liked a little too much.

"No. No, no, no," he repeated firmly to himself, running a hand beneath his cap as the rain drummed the roof above him. He had no reason to assume anything like that. It wasn't like she was keeping it, well-cared-for, in a box with a host of other cherished memories, like one would keep a love letter or engagement ring...

Frustrated with himself for winding up back where he had started, he tossed the pad of paper on the floor, where it slid beneath the bed.

"Come on... she could never..." But he didn't know that. She certainly had the capability. Those rows of teeth, how swiftly she could move through the water, her long and spindly limbs that could easily entangle and pull to the bottom of the lake...

But he couldn't imagine that she would ever hurt someone. Maybe a few fish, when she was hungry enough, but not a person—never a person. She was such a gentle spirit. At least... he thought so. How much did he really know about her? How much of what he'd seen was what she wanted him to see—and how much else had she kept from him?

_"I'm glad that you trust me. Please... continue to."_ Should he? _Could_ he, after what he'd seen?

A lightning flash and a crack of thunder interrupted his thoughts. Maybe... maybe he should just sleep on it. The thunder would be startling him out of his reveries for the rest of the night; might as well attempt to get to sleep before three a.m. for once, if he could manage it in this storm.

He switched the light off and crawled into bed, curling up with a deep sigh. Maybe a dream would show him the answer. Huh... what wishful thinking. As the rain pummeled Gravity Falls it knocked twigs and leaves with it, crackling across the roof and keeping any sleep just out of reach. Man, with the wind this strong, it made the shack creak like every rusty door in the place was opening... Wait.

Bolt upright, he stared at the door. It swayed ever so slightly in the darkness. Did he leave it open? Hadn't he shut it? He couldn't remember. Well... whatever. It wasn't the strangest thing ever to happen in Gravity Falls, and he was too close to sleep to care about it. Pulling the covers back over his shoulders, he faced the attic wall to sleep, hoping the noise wouldn't wake him up again.

"Dipper."

His heart jumped out of his throat—he spun around, sitting up at the same time, entangling himself spectacularly in his sheets as he struggled to face the voice in the darkness.

A flash of lightning brought a familiar face into focus.

"Dipper! Look! I did it!" she whispered fervently, a pride and thrill in her voice he'd never heard before.

"Kells?! What are you—"

"I did it—the storm, the full moon, it was all perfectly timed for this—look at this body! It's perfect! Okay, maybe not perfect but—it's human—"

"Human? What?!"

"Look!" As if to accompany her words, another arc of lightning illuminated her... indeed, very human, and dripping wet... body.

"Okay! Okay. I looked! Now we need to get you clothes! Oh my god..." Shielding his eyes from her naked form, he pulled open a dresser drawer, rummaging around for a spare t-shirt and shorts she could borrow. He tossed them over his shoulder, the gesture soon followed by sounds of her struggling to clothe herself: a frustrated little sigh, a "how does—this—"

"Kells..." reluctantly he turned around, grateful to see she was covered—albeit in a very... creative way. At least she got the shorts right. He sighed heavily. What did he do to deserve this?

"Look—you need to... no, that won't work." It was like dressing a toddler. "Just hold still." He pulled the shirt over her correctly, forcing his gaze to avoid looking anywhere in particular until he had her arms through the correct holes. "There..."

In the darkness, he looked at her. She was so... small now. Her hair was still that unnatural white, two horse's ears stuck up from her head, her black eyes indistinguishable from her dark skin—so that's what she meant by "maybe not perfect". Very imperfect. That shirt he lent her... did it have a pattern on it...?

"Thank you, D—"

"Wait." Moving closer, he pulled the loose fabric out to examine it. No... this was a plain shirt to begin with. This was... water? No. It was too dark.

"Blood? Kells, is this blood?!"

"Is it?" she looked down. "Oh—that's right. It is. I, um—"

"What did you do?!" His eyes jumped over her, searching for the source. It was dripping from her hands.

"Dipper, please, you know these spells take a heavy cost! Don't be upset—"

"I am upset! Look at your hands..." his voice died in his throat as he finally reached over and turned the light on. There was blood everywhere, oh, god, her hands had been bleeding this whole time, Ford would think he murdered someone, and these gashes in her palm, they were so deep he was surprised she could move her fingers, the fingers that were shaking in his grasp—

"Don't be upset," she pleaded, sounding more and more desperate with each passing second. "Please, Dipper. Please." His name was something she used liberally, as if the more she said it, the less horrified he might become. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

"This is too much, Kells. I told you not to do this!" Pulling her along behind him, he took her to the bathroom, where better light and a first aid kit could help him patch up her wounds.

"You did, but…" She didn't offer any further explanation, her small, bare footsteps on the wooden floor traipsing along in his wake. He released her wrist once they were in the small bathroom, pulling the bandages and antiseptic from the shelf.

"This is going to hurt."

Kells nodded, but said nothing; Dipper chanced a glance at her to see she was pursing her lips together tightly, doing her best not to cry. No, focus! He had to get these wounds clean and dressed, he couldn't worry about her feelings right now. He had no idea what she'd gotten into between the lake and here, how much dirt she'd rubbed into her hands, how long she juggled with rusty nails or god only knew what else.

After the water, hydrogen peroxide poured down her palm, drawing a hiss and a cry of pain from her—her hands reflexively pulled away, but Dipper kept them there with a firm grasp, draining both dried and fresh blood into the sink. Then the other hand. She was less shocked but still winced, sniffling pitifully like a child who had been playing with knives she wasn't meant to touch. His hands could feel hers trembling, though to be fair, she was taking the pain well. He wasn't sure if he would have been able to do the same.

"Okay—sit down," he instructed, placing a hand towel on her lap once she'd seated herself on the closed toilet. Kneeling before her, he took her hands gingerly and laid them face up in preparation for the bandages. The cuts were clean, at least. No hesitation showed there. He sighed as he placed clean, white gauze squares on her palms.

He could hear her fussing, but couldn't spare the attention while he was patching her up. Let her cry. This was a dangerous thing for her to do, and he wasn't happy about it in the least.

"Are you angry at me?" she whispered, her voice as fragile as spun glass. A question like that, asked in such a tremulous tone—that was playing dirty. The words budged his heart just enough.

"No." He didn't elaborate. Didn't want to. Was he angry? No, not exactly, but he _was_ worried sick, beyond frustrated that she hadn't listened to him, and still troubled about what he'd seen in her cove. What a mess… He pulled the bandages tight around her palm, fastening them with a bit of tape, and started in silence on the other hand.

Her foot tapped his bended knee. Then her other foot. And again.

"Look," she said in a small voice, words still unsteady, swinging her legs back and forth. "I have cute little toes now, like you." She wiggled them to prove they belonged to her.

He exhaled, unable to keep himself from giving the slightest chuckle at that.

"My toes are anything but cute. Come on; hold still so I don't hurt you." Newly human feet stopped fidgeting, resting on his knees instead. He finished up with her hand, both of them now covered in white gauze that he hoped would keep infection out—only time would tell.

Well, his shirt was ruined. Good thing he didn't wear that one much. She still carried the metallic scent of blood: something he suspected wouldn't go away until she got yet another change of clothes.

"Let's get you another shirt. One without blood all over it."

With a nod she stood, but swayed, her hands groping for the countertop to steady herself. Blood loss? Exhaustion? Could be either, but he wasn't about to have her pass out here: he wasn't sure he could carry her, so he needed to get her to the closest bed while she was still conscious.

"Okay, come on—lean on me." He draped her arm over his shoulders, and lean she did—wow, she was heavy, okay, that was a thing—step by step, they made their way back to the attic, Dipper using the wall for support more than once. Setting her down on his bed after sweeping papers and electronics out of the way, he found another shirt for her to wear, and let her change herself this time around.

He sighed, leaning on the closed door to his room, waiting impatiently for Kells to finish so he could finally go to sleep and quit worrying about everything for a few hours. He would deal with everything in the morning… Cleaning the blood off his floor, throwing out the papers she'd dripped on, deciding if those clothes could be salvaged or had to be tossed… He made a mental checklist of things to concern himself with in the morning. Something to look forward to. Shouldn't she be done by now?

With a tentative knock, he let himself in to find her changed and sound asleep… in his bed. Well, he guessed it wasn't a question of whether he was sleeping in the bed or on the floor. More a question of how comfortable he could manage to make the wooden floorboards. Not very, it turned out, as all he had was an extra blanket and a balled-up jacket as a makeshift pillow. Once he'd turned out the light and all but given up on a restful night's sleep, he heard his new bunkmate stirring.

"Dipper," she whispered, a dark hand patched with white dangling off the edge of the bed, "Are you asleep?" He felt like he was stuck in one of his sister's sleepovers.

"Not yet. Go to bed, Kells, you need rest."

"I _am_ in bed," she informed him. Her hand grasped his shoulder, or more accurately his sleeve, and tugged on it ever so slightly. "And you should be too. This is where humans sleep." His cheeks were burning.

"What? No, I can't share a bed with you."

"You can't? You used to fall asleep on the dock all the time… and I was with you then."

"I know. This is different—" He groaned, rubbing his weary face with both hands. "You don't understand."

"I understand enough," she objected, "but don't worry. I won't let you do anything unsavory." He could see her grin behind his eyelids, a hoarse laugh escaping his lips. Before he could reply, she continued. "Please. I need you. Here."

The words made his stomach flip.

"Uh…" he cleared his throat; it cracked despite himself. "What… what do you mean?"

"I need you to sleep here." Although there was a note of pleading, it was almost like a statement of fact. She tugged on his shirt again.

"Will you… tell me why, if I do?"

"Maybe."

That was as close to a yes as he was going to get—and he had the feeling she wasn't about to let up. Shuffling off the thin blanket he was using, he crawled in next to her, brown eyes struggling to see her expression in the darkness. What was she thinking…?

"There." She cast the covers over his shoulder, then she scooted closer, too close—! Everything was too hot, his face, his sweating palms, his nervous breathing, so why did he shiver when she moved? He wasn't used to her body being this way, always expecting a cool touch from the lake spirit, but now that she was human… her fingers in his curls were so warm. Her head rested above his on the pillow, leaving him with a view of her long, dark throat, the rise and fall of her shoulders as her breathing slowed. He supposed he wasn't getting that answer after all. But… that wasn't so bad.

"My little… constellation…" she murmured in her half-conscious state, her hand absently stroking his hair, just once. "You're safe… safe now…"

"Safe…?"

Though his eyes looked up in an attempt to find a response, he only received silence as a reply. Her body curled around him as if cradling a fragile and priceless treasure in her loose fingers—and in that moment, he couldn't help but believe her.

"Dipper Pines!" An urgent whisper reached his ears, and he cracked open his tired eyes, rubbing them in the morning light.

"Wha..." Before he could get a full word out, someone was tugging on his ear, dragging him out of bed. "Owowowowow--!" Another grasp closed on his arm, pulling him the opposite direction. A strange, unearthly hiss sounded from behind him, then his ear was released, two arms wrapping around his torso protectively as he struggled to bring everything into focus through his bleary morning vision.

"Great Uncle Ford?"

"Dipper, I understand that you're an adult now, albeit a young one, and that you are capable of making your own decisions. But this is unacceptable! First I find the front door broken in, blood all the way up the stairs, I come up to find you here with a girl in your bed—and not a human girl! You have no idea what trouble you're in—"

A voice at his ear hissed curses at the man in another language. This was too much.

"Stop, stop, stop— Kells, this is my Great Uncle Ford. You remember, I've told you about him, right? The author of the journals?"

"I remember," she growled. Dipper turned his head to look at her. Despite all her bluster, she was cowering behind him, ears pinned back and eyes fixed on Ford as if she were... afraid.

"That's right... and I remember you," Ford spoke slowly, scrutinizing her with a thoughtful hand on his chin. "That kelpie in the lake. Here to give me more trouble?"

"Trouble?" Dipper looked at his uncle.

"I haven't seen this one in almost forty years— hm, she hasn't aged a day. Back then I had to bribe kids to talk to her, just to have something to put in my journal! And let me tell you, children are terrible informants."

"Uh..."

"She was a nightmare to research! I could barely scrape together enough for a page. To top it off, something always seemed to go wrong—any recordings I had weren't clear enough to understand, or my papers would get lost, or one of us would spill coffee on them. I don't know how she did it, but she was trouble from the start."

Kells giggled into Dipper's shoulders as Ford detailed his woes.

"How did you get her to show herself?" Ford's curiosity was beginning to overtake the need to chew Dipper out for the mess and worry he'd supposedly caused. "Did you trap her, somehow? I didn't think she could come out of the lake..." Dipper held his hands up, unsure if he could handle much more questioning this early in the morning.

"First—I've known her since me and Mabel were kids. So, she trusts me." He cast a backwards glance at Kells to confirm this assumption; she nodded. "I didn't trap her, and... she can't leave the lake. Normally."

"Normally? What happened to change that?"

"That's what I want to know." Dipper gave a conspicuous look to Kells, who only sank to the opposite corner of his back in silence. "Well... Uncle Ford, I've been researching her."

"Researching her. Is that what kids call it these days?"

Before Dipper had a chance to vehemently deny his great uncle's implications, the door to his room burst open, slamming noisily against the wall.

"GUEEESS WHO'S HERE EARLY!" The peppy voice was far louder than anyone expected, even for the perfectly posed girl in the doorway whose expertly coiffed curls bounced around her face like bubbles. She looked a tad disconcerted by the stunned silence she was met with.

"It's me! ...Mabel! Yaaay..." Her eyes glanced over the three in the room—when they fell on Kells, the realization began to dawn.

"Oh... Ohhh! OHHH!" She realized with increasing urgency, all but jumping in place at the scene before her. "Busteeed!"

"Mabel!" Kells excitedly jumped up from her spot behind Dipper, bounding across the bed to tackle the second twin in a merciless embrace.

"And so begins the hug train!" Mabel cheered, similarly relentless in her grip on Kells. "C'mon Dipper, c'mon Grunkle Ford! Get in on this, you know you want to!"

Dipper buried his face in his hands, collapsing back onto his bed with a groan. This was going to be a long, _long_ summer.


	6. Close

It only took all day to set up the room for two more occupants. Kells helped as best she could, but Mabel was the real MVP of the day, helping the scrawnier Dipper move her mattress in and rummage around in Ford's storage for an extra inflatable bed. Her energy and excitement, especially once told that Kells would be staying a while, seemed boundless. His sister could be a handful, but by and large Dipper was glad that she'd arrived early. For one, she jumped at the chance to take Kells shopping for new clothes, which he had been dreading since the first thought of it; he didn't have the money or the fashion sense to be of great help to the newly human Kells. Luckily, his sister had both. The two came back that evening bearing a mountain of bags from the nearest mall.

"And... where did you get all this money, again?"

"My channel is really taking off these days, Dipper—and I also asked Grenda to wire me a little. That's what friends are for!"

"Friends are for funding shopping sprees...?"

"Just one of the many duties of a friend with really deep pockets. Heheh!"

Pleasantly dizzy from the whirlwind of a day, Kells simply nodded in agreement, removing the sun hat and shades she'd worn in order to avoid questions about her more inhuman attributes. The sun streamed in through the door behind her, illuminating her form in the amber light of evening. Dipper tried not to look.

His mind had been on the skull all day—on her— despite his attempts to refocus it. He couldn't concentrate on his work, his studies; burning curiosity haunted him when he'd gone up to the roof to collect his thoughts. It was eating at him. Why was that skull there? Who did it belong to? Even Kells' presence raised more questions than he liked. Why did she suddenly decide to take such a risky move? She could have died if something went wrong in her human transformation. Did it have something to do with what she'd said last night? What did she mean by "you're safe now"? Safe from what?

"Dipper?"

"Huh—?" His voice cracked. Kells' black eyes stared back at him with concern as Mabel seated herself at the table with him.

"You sure are thinking hard over there. I'll be in your room for a while, getting things situated."

"Our room!" Mabel chimed in helpfully, beaming. Kells returned the smile, though hers was a tired one.

"Our room—of course. Thank you both, loves. I would be lost without you." Kissing the tops of the twins' heads, she drifted out of the room, leaving Dipper and Mabel alone in the room for the first time since the second twin arrived.

"She really is just like she used to be, huh?" Mabel asked, leaning an elbow on the kitchen table as she watched the otherworldly girl traipse upstairs. Dipper nodded in silence.

"What's on your mind, bro-bro? Thinkin' about your new girlfriend?"

"New—Mabel, come on," he sighed, rolling his eyes. "You know it isn't like that."

"Could've fooled meee!" Her sing-song voice elicited an annoyed groan from her brother. "Staying in your bed, wearing your clothes... sounds like girlfriend material to me."

"She didn't have anything else, it was the only thing I could do."

"Sure, sure. You know I'm just messing with you, Dipper," Mabel gave him a sympathetic smile, leaning over the table to whisper to him conspiratorially. "What's really up? Come on... you can tell me."

"Well… Something weird is going on," Dipper divulged, glancing at the stairs to make sure the lake spirit in question wasn't lurking somewhere. "She's... acting strange, lately. Only when we're alone. Sometimes she looks distracted, stares off into space like she sees something that I can't. Last night, she..." He could leave out the part where she cuddled up to him in bed. Mabel didn't need any more fuel for her fire. "...She said something about me being safe now. Now that she's here, I guess? I don't know..."

Mabel, meanwhile, nodded sagely. "I've seen this before."

"Wh—you have? What is it?" He asked eagerly, leaning over the mushy cereal he'd been pondering to better hear her assessment.

"It sounds like a serious case. She's definitely... got the hots for you, Dipper! You gotta go for it!"

"I don't know why I expected a serious answer." Despite his worry, the wheels in his brain turning over and over trying to understand what was going on, he felt himself laugh a little. Mabel was good at that. She stood up, ruffling Dipper's hair with one hand.

"I know that if something is up, my nerdy brother will get to the bottom of it, and he'll always have his incredibly beautiful twin sister to bail him out when he does. In the meantime... try not to fry your brain thinking too hard, okay? Things will work out!" As always, her carefree attitude had a way of comforting him, despite solving very little.

"Yeah... thanks, Mabel."

"No problem! I gotta go talk to Fordsy real quick. I'll help Kells get squared away too, so don't you worry about that either. You just... enjoy that soggy cereal." With a laugh, she tossed a careless wave over her shoulder before making her way to the former gift shop. She was right... Things would work out. He was sure of it.

No matter how many times he tried thinking that, he never quite believed it.

Well, the cereal was a loss—he stood with the sad remnants of his dinner, if one could call it that, and dumped it unceremoniously into the garbage. Come to think of it, had Kells had dinner yet? It wasn't the type of thing Mabel often forgot, but when she was swept up with one thing or another (in this case, Kells' fashion emergency) there was no telling what she might omit. He could at least ask; it would be considerate, although his cooking skills were near nonexistent. She did seem awfully tired when she'd come home.

He didn't hear any stirring from within the attic as the stairs creaked under his feet. No—he did hear something, but it wasn't the noise of clothes rustling and dresser drawers closing. It was... talking? Was Mabel in there already?

"Kells?" ...No response. He knocked gingerly on the door. Still nothing but that unintelligible murmuring on the other side. "I'm coming in..."

He wasn't expecting the next thing he set eyes upon, but with his luck the past couple of days, he couldn't say he was particularly surprised.

Before him sprawled a dirt pentagram in the center of the room, candles and stones placed at specific geometric points at the circle surrounding it. Symbols and words in an old, arcane language, drawn carefully in chalk, lined the edges of the star and created patterns within patterns—it was hard to believe she'd crafted this in the ten or fifteen minutes she'd had alone in the room. But, he supposed that a hundred or so years of experience lent itself to the speed in her craft.

With white chalk dusting her fingers, she had her hands placed firmly on the ground as she knelt at the base of the casting circle. She chanted in tongues, something Dipper had witnessed a few times before— but it didn't get any less unsettling, no matter how often he'd heard it. It was an ancient language, one that humans were never meant to understand, words that transcended the time of man and perhaps of the earth itself.

He had been instructed many times not to interrupt these rites. Even as he noticed her hands raising, bandages conspicuously missing and palms freshly scarred, even as he watched her pluck the kitchen knife from the floor and wrap her hand around its blade, his feet hesitated to step into the circle.

He couldn't help but say her name, trying to snap her out of her trance, though that act itself was dangerous. A tiny river of blood trickled down the blade, falling to the center of the pentagram, where it soaked the top of an unlit black candle. The spirit in the center of the room sighed, smiling faintly as if relieved that it was now over—she held her cut to her lips, licking the blood still flowing from it to stem the stream.

"Thank you, Dipper." She spoke quietly, an apologetic smile on her lips. "I know that was unpleasant to watch. You can come in now, it's safe."

"This needs to stop," he crossed the room to her, frowning, taking her hand to look at the fresh wound. "Kells, you can't keep doing this—and in my room even—what _was_ that?"

"Our room," she corrected, pulling her hand to her chest. She picked up the candle in the center of the former pentagram and set it on the dresser between the twins' beds. "Just cleaning house, my little constellation. It's nothing to worry about."

"I'm worrying about it! Come on, I'm—I don't want to see you hurt yourself anymore... I don't care if you do your magic, just, no more blood. Please?"

"It's the most powerful agent I have," Kells stated matter-of-factly, her gaze concentrated on aligning the candle directly in the center of the triangular window. But when she turned to look at him, her carefully neutral face shifted to a pained smile. "Oh, Dipper... you're so sweet. I won't have to use blood again anytime soon. I promise."

"Okay..." Though he wasn't sure how sincere that promise was, he supposed it would do for now. He searched her expression, trying in vain to understand what was going on behind those dark eyes. They held more mystery to him than the entirety of the night sky. "We should re-bandage your hands..." Kells nodded in agreement.

"But first," she raised a finger, "I need to light this... where did those matches go...?" Kneeling on the ground, she peeked beneath the many bags of clothes for the matchbox she'd lost, pulling all kinds of plastic and papers from her surroundings to find it.

"Here, let me help—" At the moment he'd offered, he realized that she had her eyes set on a pad of paper she'd pulled from beneath his bed. The one he had tossed there the previous evening. Oh... no. No, no, no, no, not that—

"D-don't worry about that! Ha ha!" His voice cracked as he swiped the list away from her, but to his horror, the color had already drained from her face. "Just—just a, um, some theories for a show I'm... watching..." Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew she didn't believe them for a single second. He really was a bad liar.

"Don't lie to me." Her voice was low. This was it. She would be furious—she wouldn't speak to him for the rest of the time she was here, he had wrecked his chance with her, even his chance to study her, gone, just because he couldn't keep his hands out of her personal things, because his curiosity was insatiable and he was just nosy enough to ignore the boundaries she'd laid down so kindly before him. He had done it. He had ruined everything.

"I'm sorry... Kells, I'm sorry, I didn't—I wasn't thinking, you know, and I just..." His apologies were feeble and he couldn't imagine that she would accept them. Her hands covered her face as she sat there against the bed, and she pulled her knees up close to her chest. "Kells...?"

"I should have known. I should have... oh, god, I never wanted you to..." Her voice shook beneath the weight of her tears—it was like a dagger in his chest. She was crying, in earnest, crying because of him. His fault. A hand reached out for her, but stopped midway, falling to his side. He didn't have any right to comfort her... But he found himself sitting on the floor next to her, regardless.

"I... I need to tell you. I should have, before, but I... I've never told anyone…" She sighed, burying her head in her hands and sniffling pitifully. "It isn't what you think it is. I promise."

"Kells... Listen—I never thought… I mean… I trust you. I do." He felt his resolve strengthen as he spoke the words, as if by giving them life they became fact. "And I don't… I don't want you to tell me if you're not ready." That, though, was stretching the truth just a tad. He was still dying to know just what perfectly reasonable excuse she had for tenderly harboring human bones in her home.

"No," she shook her head vehemently, "You deserve to know. It… isn't right for me to keep it from you, of all people."

Wait, what did that mean?

"Please just… listen. I can answer questions after." She stopped him before he'd even spoke, which he didn't mind, taking the opportunity to nod his assent. Despite the tears rolling down her cheeks, she smiled tenderly at him in response. She really was a fragile soul, in too many ways.

"This was… many years ago. It still hurts to think of, sometimes." Her voice fell to a whisper. "It still hurts."

"I knew a young human girl. She must have been… a little older than you and Mabel, when you first came to Gravity Falls. Her name was Rosetta." Kells stared at the bed opposite them with a bittersweet and distant look in her eyes, as if she were watching her memories unfold on Mabel's colorful bed sheets.

"She was… a troubled girl. She hadn't a friend in the world. Often she wandered to the lake, in the middle of the night, in her white night gown… Like a spectre of the fog. Her hair was impossibly long, and pale. To her family, cutting it was a sin. Many things… many things were sins to them.

"Rosetta… she would walk onto the dock with nothing but the moonlight to guide her path. No lantern, no candle. And she would talk to the water. I don't think she knew that I was always there… listening. I was listening from the first. She would tell the lake her woes, her victories, her dreams. She was lovely—I could never fathom why she was so lonely. But I was willing to be her friend, even if no one else was.

"Not long after we began speaking, I learned the real reason she was alone. Her family was… severe. Strictly religious—though back in those days, that was the usual way of things. Their real cruelty laid in the way they kept her. She was different. She was teased mercilessly by children who didn't understand her, and shunned by adults who didn't know how special she was. So, she was kept quiet and behind closed doors. It left her trapped, a prisoner in her own home, a jail she could only escape by sneaking away in the dead of night.

"She was a good girl, if desperately lonely and different from the rest. She always brought me presents when she could spare them. Dolls made of twigs and straw. Pretty stones she found on the road. And she would tell me beautiful things, and hideous things, and taught me... taught me how to read. She would say... Rosetta would say... 'Kellsie, my love, you must be an angel that God sent to me in these dark times.'" Kells let out a small and bitter laugh, a new wave of teardrops rolling down her cheeks.

"Imagine that. Me, an angel. As you know... I am the farthest thing from it." Despite Kells' self-deprecation, as Dipper watched her in silence, he felt that he understood the words Rosetta had given her.

"Things grew worse. As they are wont to do. She told me, always, that I was the only one who understood her, that I was the only one who cared. She said she wanted to be with me forever. I thought it was... sweet. And it was... it was, in a way." She paused, quiet for a moment. "She loved me, Dipper. As purely and wholly as anyone could love. And I loved her.

"Then, she was gone. I didn't see her for... for weeks. I thought she had forgotten me. Or moved away. Or... I didn't want to think of it. But after a while, I didn't have a choice." Kells gulped down the lump in her throat, her next words in a hoarse whisper. "Because I was the one who found her body."

"Kells..." Dipper began, but she put up a hand.

"She drowned herself in that lake. I had seen it many times before, and, I... I kept her. I felt it was… what she would have wanted." Kells closed her eyes, attempting to quell her tears with a deep breath. When she next spoke, her words were a bit more stable. "So... now you understand."

"Kells, I'm sor—" his words were stopped by her hand, which covered his mouth.

"That's enough of that." She was smiling at him through her sorrow, and wiped her face with the back of her other palm. "I'm sorry to have kept it from you in the first place—it must have scared you silly. Don't worry. I feel good. It feels nice... to tell someone. After all this time. It must have been... a hundred years ago, and I'm still hanging on to it. But... I'm glad I told you. And I'm glad you were the one I told."

Dipper wasn't sure what to say. He had betrayed her by prying, and also by thinking even for one moment that she was responsible for someone's death. At the same time, a part of him longed to hold her until her tears dried up— he wanted to console her, to kiss the sadness out of her cheeks, run his fingers over hers and tell her terrible jokes until she was laughing again. But he couldn't do that. He couldn't.

"Mortal relationships... Falling in love with humans... It's something I can't do." As she spoke, he acutely felt the crack running down the middle of his heart. He swallowed hard, eyes fixed on the suitcase in the corner of the room, covered in custom decals and stickers.

"Humans are so fragile, and so very temporary. I've seen hundreds come and go. I've watched lives begin and end from that lake. I can't love humans—there is no happy ending waiting for me, or for them. It's cruel to pretend otherwise. I have to keep myself at arm's length, and I have to have the strength to do that when they want to pull me closer."

So this was how it ended: before it even began. His stomach was in knots, head angled away from her to hide his feelings as best he could. He didn't even have the right to be upset—nothing had happened between them. And nothing would.

"But you, Dipper..." His breath caught in his throat. The softest touch alighted on his hand, her warm fingers slipping easily between his. "You make me weak." She was crying again. He could hear it as her voice died beneath her tears. "So weak..." Her thumb stroked the edge of his palm, pulling his eyes to her—and he was surprised to be met with a black gaze just as gentle and afraid as her words. She bit her quivering lip, as if she could stop it trembling. It was tempting. More than tempting.

"Kells...?"

"Yes?"

"Can..." His hand curved around hers, squeezing it gently. She returned the gesture. "...Can I kiss you?"

Her cheeks flushed with warm, red, and all too human blood, lighting up her dark skin in tandem with the rosy sunlight flooding through the window behind her. She nodded.

"I-If... If you want to, Dipper..."

"I do." He felt more confident in that than he had in just about anything the past two weeks. This was it. This was his chance. His heart was beating wildly out of his chest, he was sure his face was even redder than hers, and as he felt the warmth of her sigh on his lips, the realization dawned on him that he had been waiting for this moment for seven years.

"Aaand how's my favorite Kellsie doing all by—" Mabel burst in with a peppy greeting, but stopped dead when she saw what she was interrupting, both Kells and Dipper turning away from each other with enough velocity to give them both whiplash. "Nooo, NO, NO, NO! You guys—forget I was here! Keep doing your thing! I'll come back in twenty minutes!" Mabel fled the scene, slamming the door behind her as if that would revive the mood that had gone six feet under. Mortified, Dipper couldn't bring himself to look back at Kells. He hadn't even gotten to... and he was so close... Who knows where else it could have gone—stupid Mabel—!

He barely heard it at first, soft as it was, but by the time he turned his head, Kells was laughing warmly and openly. Her hand... Her hand was still in his, he realized, as it shifted, warm and soft in his grasp.

She was holding his hand, and she was laughing. That was enough, for now.


	7. Enjoy the Calm

"Kells... no offense, but that candle..."

"It kiiinda smells like a frat boy died in here."

"Nice. It doesn't smell _that_ bad," Dipper chuckled. He glanced over his book at Kells, who was busy tying and untying knots in the end trail of Mabel's yarn.

"You'll just have to put up with the smell until it burns out, I'm afraid."

"Aw, man... Look, even Waddles doesn't like it. C'mere, Waddles! Come on!" While Mabel beckoned to her pet pig, he hesitated in the doorway, little hooves click-clacking nervously on the wooden floor.

"What's in that candle, anyway?" Dipper laid the book face down on his lap. "You put something in the center, right?"

"Oh, nothing special." Kells pulled her thin little blanket over her legs, winding the thread between her fingers one at a time. "Lamb's ears, snake root, dragon's blood, and devil's nettle."

"O...kay..." He was pretty sure those were folk names for plants. What plants? He had no idea—their scientific names would probably remain a mystery to him. Regardless, the candle's scent wasn't unbearable, just... powerful.

"What's it for, anyway?" Mabel's casual question as she coaxed Waddles into bed gave Kells pause. Dipper noticed that her hands stopped moving for a moment, though they picked back up where they left off without too much delay. Not that he was watching her particularly closely, or... anything. Nothing like that.

"Just for my peace of mind." Kells gave her a smile so serene that Mabel couldn't possibly question any further. Or at least... Dipper knew he wouldn't have been able to.

"Peace of mind? Are you worried about something?"

"Well, I have to keep the ghouls and goblins of Gravity Falls away from my favorite twins, don't I?" she chuckled, pulling the knots of red yarn from her fingers. "Otherwise, what use am I?"

"I don't know, you're fair company," Dipper chimed in with a teasing smile. "Tolerable, I'd say."

"Oh! I'm so glad the master of the house approves of my presence. What a joyous day it is to be me!" Kells clasped her hands together over her heart, easily playing along with a sly grin. Her bunkmates laughed, Mabel's bedsprings creaking painfully under the weight of her pet pig as it scrambled into the blankets.

"All right you crazy lovebirds, that's enough flirting for one day. I don't know about you, but me and Waddles are pooped!" The curly-haired girl plopped back onto her bed, pulling the covers over her shoulders, and her brother went back to his reading with a roll of his eyes.

"G'night Dipper."

"Night, Mabel."

"Night Kells."

"Good night, lovely."

And then there were two.

He couldn't make it through another paragraph before he felt his gaze flicker above the pages of his book—and to his surprise, he caught another pair of black eyes watching him. Kells smiled bashfully, turning her gaze away and back to raveling the yarn for Mabel's later use. He couldn't speak, lest he disturb his sister, and though thoughts raced through his mind at a mile a minute, the freedom of silence was a welcome relief. Kells seemed to think so as well, leaving it to hang undisturbed in the air between them.

Though he was glad not to have to make awkward conversation, there were too many things on his mind to concentrate properly on his book when the two of them were virtually alone together. His mind kept sneakily creeping back to that evening's events no matter where he turned it. Kells obviously... well, _apparently_ liked him, that was what she'd said, wasn't it? Wasn't it...? She didn't say no when he asked to kiss her. A horrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach nagged at him as he considered she could have done that just to spare his feelings. She wouldn't, though... right?

Ugh, his palms were sweating. Nervous. Thinking too much. As he placed the book face down on his lap again, he heard a stirring across the room, and caught Kells already halfway to his bed.

"Kells--?" he spoke, barely a whisper escaping his lips. She didn't offer a word in return, holding a finger up to hers. His stomach flipped as she reached for his lap, but she only grabbed the book, thank god, thank god?—she marked his place with a nearby paper and placed the closed tome neatly on the dresser at his side.

"The candle is almost out," her high-pitched, strangely accented voice murmured to him, "And it's time for Dipper Pines to sleep. Rest your head now, my little constellation. No more thinking."

"Come on, I wasn't done with my book..." he protested lamely. "I don't have to be tucked in."

"Au contraire. Little Dipper would stay up all night if I let him. But this is why I'm here." Ugh, that nickname again.

"You're here to mother me?"

"Ah, not exactly." She sprinkled a touch of mischief in their whispered conversation. "But to look after you, yes."

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not exactly twelve years old anymore." He rolled his eyes.

"Believe you me... I've noticed."

He ran a flustered hand through his hair, using the motion to hide the heat on his cheeks.

"Now lie down or I will get in with you." Though her threat sounded more like a reward at this point, he had no desire to spark any more merciless teasing from his sister or panic any further about his proximity to Kells, and so begrudgingly complied. The candlelight flickered, drawing both their gazes; it weakened, and finally snuffed itself out with a final breath of smoke.

"I told you it would go out soon." Kells' voice drifted to his ears in the inky blackness, and he felt the comforting—albeit strangely nostalgic—rustling of the blanket being pulled over his shoulders.

"Yeah, yeah. You don't need magic to see that..." he chuckled.

"True. But you know what else I kept with these eyes?" She must have been referring to the pitch-black eyes that didn't undergo a human transformation. "Excellent vision in the darkness."

"Really? Night v...?" his question was quieted by a set of soft fingertips on his cheek, coaxing him to look upwards, where his vision was only barely beginning to make out the dark form of Kells' face in the moonlight. Even if he wanted to finish his inquiry, he couldn't have. Not with the way her lips traced a fairy-light touch on his.

Not with the press further, as if a simple peck couldn't sate her, not with her breathy sigh and the feeling of her spun moonstone hair slipping between his fingers as his thumb brushed her cheek in a way he had been dreaming of for years without knowing he'd ever dreamt such a thing. Not with the faint sound of her gripping the bed sheets in a fist, or the way she kissed him once, twice, three times with increasing abandon. Not with her smooth, long neck, the cut of her collarbones beneath his touch...

She pulled away. He saw the light patch of her hand on her chest, as if she were trying to contain her runaway pulse by holding down her heart.

"Goodnight, Dipper," she whispered, a note in her voice that he couldn't place—but, whatever it was, he wasn't sure it was good... Had he done something wrong? His hand did move to her neck—he wasn't thinking—was that too far? He should have taken it slower. Heart got ahead of his brain. God—

She leaned down, for a moment pulling his heart out through his throat as he expected another kiss. He got one, but not as he might have hoped. A quiet kiss goodnight, planted on his forehead, right in the middle of his birthmark.

The faintest sound of her footsteps reached his ears as she moved to her own bed, leaving him alone with his thoughts. At times, they were his worst enemy. He heard his sister stir in her bed, turning over to face him, though he couldn't make out her features in the shadows—but he knew she was awake when she made a particularly lewd hand gesture at him. He threw her the middle finger and turned over, eliciting a highly amused and muffled snicker from his sibling.

He felt his eyes crack open in the early morning, the smallest noises of activity rousing him from slumber. The door creaked. He glanced at Mabel—no, still asleep—Kells? Gone. Of course... What did she have to do this early in the morning? His heavy eyelids begged him to go back to sleep, but he had to at least make sure she wasn't getting into any trouble, or inadvertently breaking all the shiny new human devices she might encounter here. He already had a door to replace on his own dime, after all.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he tossed the covers aside and crept out of the room. He could still hear her footsteps on the stairs, and then... a door? Something creaked, prompting a hushed "shh" from her, as if she could quiet it with a scolding. Cute.

When he rounded the corner into the former gift shop, he saw the ladder extended to the floor and felt the warm breeze seeping in through the rooftop hatch. He was surprised she remembered this from seven years ago. Though he wasn't sure his barely-conscious self could handle climbing a ladder, he needed to make sure she wasn't starting some bizarre pagan ritual with a dead raven and the blood of the innocent on the roof of his great uncle's house. Or something. And so he ascended. His head bumped against something at the top, and for a moment he wondered if she had closed the door on him—until he looked up to meet her empty eyes.

"I knew you would follow me," she teased, sitting back with a smile and rubbing her forehead where he'd bonked against it. "You're too curious for your own good, Dipper Pines."

"What are you doing up here so early?" he cut to the chase. A part of him was still very eager to get back to sleep.

"Just... thinking. Actually... come here. Sit with me. A sunrise is good for the mind."

"Well, see, I'm missing out on some really high-quality slumber, so—"

"Come on, it won't kill you," she insisted, pulling his arm up with surprising strength.

"Okay, okay. What happened to me needing my rest?" He gave her a tired grin. She sighed, shaking her head with the quietest laugh.

"Too smart-mouthed for your own good, too." The two of them moved to the edge of the dormer roof, where they dangled their legs off the little cliff and looked out at the sunlight filtering through the trees.

Okay, this was... this was fine. Everything was fine. He was completely alone with her, watching a romantic sunrise, and that was... that was a thing. A thing happening right then. It was a great thing! But an alien one. His past excursions into romance were brief and didn't involve a whole lot of courting. He was young and dumb. That might not have changed too much yet.

But now was the time. This was his chance to really get it right, and Kells was older, more experienced, he couldn't just jump into all this headfirst and expect it to be fine—okay, so he needed a plan. A plan. It would help if he knew what he was aiming for. What did he even want? For her to fall in love?

Wait... love? When was any of this about love? Was love something _he_ wanted? Love was a little... far, maybe, for this point, a little fast. But then why had he even thought of it? What was _happening_ here?!

She leaned back on her hands, her head lolling back to look at him with eyes that were still a little sleepy.

"You're sweating," she remarked matter-of-factly. Oh, god. He was. Self-conscious, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand. "What's wrong? Is it... am I making you uncomfortable?"

"No, no no no—" he insisted, though he realized that wasn't strictly true. "Well—I mean, no, but in a way—"

"Listen," she interrupted, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about last night." Kells pulled her knees to her chest, resting her chin on them as she stared into the rising sun. He felt his heart sink. She regretted it?

"I just... it's not..." she closed her eyes in frustration, as if annoyed that she couldn't find the words. "It wasn't right of me. It _isn't_ right of me, to... want you to..." Her voice trailed off in a whisper.

"...Want me to... what?"

"Mmm," she sighed, rubbing her eyes with one hand as if trying to appease a headache. "No. I don't want to say that. You're... I care about you too much. I can't do this to you."

"Do what?"

"Inflict myself upon you." Her words hung in the air—he didn't know how to reach out and take them in his arms. He felt cold, suddenly. "You're young, yet. So much of your life still lies ahead. Other... romances, other loves. People who can actually be with you."

"You're here with me." He watched her carefully. Every movement, avoidance of his gaze, nervous tugging at her fingers, set off new alarms in his mind. This was the exact opposite of what he'd expected, or... hoped for.

"For now."

"For how long?"

"...Maybe until the end of summer. If I'm lucky." So that's why she needed so much blood. And her own blood, at that. This temporary humanity spell was for the long game.

"My point is—" she interrupted his thoughts, "—after that, where would we be? You will leave Gravity Falls. I wouldn't dream of asking you to stay. Then, what, you pine for me until next summer? Try to find a way to turn me human? No." She shook her head.

"I-I think that's an oversimplification," he furrowed his brow, frowning as his voice jumped. "What if I want to stay? What if I need to?"

"Need to—no. Absolutely not. You can't stay here, Dipper." She whipped around suddenly, staring at the roof behind them as if she'd heard a ghost.

"What? What is it?"

"Nothing. Just the leaves... Dipper, I can't... I can't cause you that pain. I can't bear to see you suffer because I can't control myself." She took a deep, shaky breath. "I'm sorry I kissed you. I shouldn't have. It was a cruel thing of me to do."

"I still haven't heard a good reason why." He was surprised by his own candidness—but this was important. "Kells. I can't see the future. No one can—"

"Some people can."

"You and I can't. Listen, Kells." Dipper took her hand in both of his as if it were made of glass. "I... I like you. I already do. And I kind of... I'm starting to wonder if I always did. I mean... not always, but, since I met you... I wanted—I always wanted to come back. So if that's what you're trying to save me from, you're a little late." He tried to smile, though he wasn't sure if it really came through. She didn't look convinced.

"I don't want to hurt you." Her whisper carried on the wind, whipped away by silence almost before he could hear it. He knew her heart was in the right place. It always was.

"I... I can't promise that you won't. Maybe... we can just... Can't we just try? For now?"

She gave a heavy sigh.

"You have to understand, Dipper. I'm not like you. When the summer ends... I have to go back to the lake. You have to go back to your life outside Gravity Falls. I can't follow you. I can't be with you. No one will understand. In the end, I will outlive you. What kind of affair is that, for a young man in his best years?"

"I do understand that. But I don't care."

A tortured smile broke her frown. She reached out, a hand lightly brushing the stubble on his jawline.

"So brave. My little constellation... not so little anymore." A sigh followed her words, defeated, but not unhappy. "Okay. We can... try. But... please. Don't hate me. In the end, please don't hate me."

"I don't think I could if I tried." He tried smoothing out her hair—she leaned into his touch, closing her eyes blissfully.

"Silly boy. Hate is such a fine line away from love." She gave him a pained smile. "This won't end well."

"Maybe not. But, I think... for now, this is pretty nice."

"...It is," she nodded, and the next thing he knew she was leaning against his shoulder, warm and small and infinitely more fragile than he'd ever imagined. Her dark, fuzzy little equine ear brushed against his cheek, twitching ticklishly before finally settling down. Cute... And his hand fit so comfortably in her waist... This was the last thing he'd imagined for his return trip to Gravity Falls. He leaned his head on hers, warm brown eyes watching the sunrise from dozing lids. The sky lightened, birds and squirrels began racing through the trees, creating a cacophony that was just peaceful enough to fall asleep to, and the two of them reclined on the rough red tiles of the rooftop. She was breathing quietly next to him, his arm under her cheek. There weren't many moments Dipper wished he could have forever—but this was one of them.

Her body... felt so light. His arm slipped off of her as she rose, hot summer air stagnant and silent around them. He rolled onto his back, watching her ascend, asleep, so peaceful, her limp human body dangling in midair like bait on a fishing hook. Wait... that wasn't right... he couldn't liken her to some worm. She was a doll... a doll on a string. Slowly hoisted farther into the bleak beyond.

The sky was so dark. Blacker than black. It wasn't just the sky... everything. Everything except her heavenly self. She was the only beacon of light for miles in any direction—and he was perfectly content, no, privileged, to watch her exist as an angel in this desolate place. He reached out to her. But no, he didn't, his arm was so slow... was it even moving...?

He couldn't move. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak, and it was so warm, too warm. The beautiful Kells turned slowly in midair, hair dangling on either side of her face like a curtain of light blocking her expression from any other. Only he could see her eyes wide open, lips parted in equal parts awe and horror. Her legs shifted—with the most torturous cracking sound, they broke and broke again, lengthening with her shrieks of pain, twisting until they more resembled cracks in a sidewalk than human legs. Her tears fell on his cheeks. A strained whimper escaped his lips that was supposed to be a scream; his fingers trembled where he tried to reach up and pull her from the agony she was bathed in. Her hands sharpened, stretching 'til he could see the outline of bone, a white flame flickering to life in her fathomless depths of unblinking eyes.

Blood dripped on him. His wildly searching eyes couldn't find the source. It trickled. It poured. It pooled around his ears, soaking into his hair in thick clots. Eyes. Eyes, hundreds of them, thousands, opening one by one in the sky above them. Distant laughing. Thick multitudes of wings protruded from twisting sky-flesh, shining and glistening as if wet with tears, the laughter was closer, louder, it was at his ears like nails on a chalkboard—

"Dipper!" Her voice was so far away. His body shook violently. "Dipper—wake up! Wake—"

His eyes tore open. A peaceful mid-morning sky, birdsongs echoing in his ears. The worried Kells hovered overhead, her hands resting on his shoulders—she had been shaking him awake.

"You were having a night terror. Your heart was beating so fast... a-and your breathing was so shallow... I'm glad I could wake you..."

He raised his hand, immensely relieved when it actually did as he willed it to. "Yeah... I..." he mumbled breathlessly, slowly hoisting himself up.

"What did you see? What happened in it?" she interrupted, her tone urgent. He was too glad to be alive and conscious to have been committing the nightmare to memory all this time.

"I don't... uh... I don't really remember." She looked frustrated at his answer, and he grasped desperately for something to give her. "It was dark. And you were... in danger...? I don't know, there was blood, and wings, and eyes. I couldn't move..." His eyes locked to hers. "It's just a dream, right? That's not... telling the future or something, is it?"

"No," she answered definitively. "It is a dream—your fears coming to light in your subconscious. Eyes and... wings, hm... Dipper, I want you to tell me if you dream of these things again. It's not prophetic—try not to read deeply into it— but your mind could be trying to tell you something. We'll pay attention to what it's saying, yes?" She tried on an encouraging smile, but Dipper wasn't convinced.

"What does it mean?"

"It could mean anything. We'll just have to see."

"Yeah... all right..." He got the distinct impression that she knew much more than she was letting on, but prying further would get him nowhere. He might have to do some investigation on his own with what little he had...

"No good will come of obsessing over it—trust me, my little constellation."

"I do."

To an extent.


	8. Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to give a sincere thank-you to all those who have left kudos and comments thus far. I truly appreciate your encouragement and support! Thank you all for the love and kindness!

Her hand was already in the fish tank.

"KELLS!" Dipper scolded in a stage whisper, trying not to alert his great uncle to her mischief through the thin wall. "Quit it!"

"I've not seen this manner of fish before. A taste won't hurt..."

He grabbed her arm, pulling her hand out of the water just before Ford rounded the corner with his energy drink in hand. Kells gave Dipper a scornful look while nervous laughter bubbled up from him—if he wanted Kells to stay here, he really had to sell this, he had to make it work.

"So, you know, I can... uh, Mabel and I can help pay for what she needs. And, I'm still studying what she's capable of—this human body is a completely new step forward, if she can not only materialize it but inhabit it in such a seamless way, imagine the possibilities! Maybe with the right amount of power she can even make fully separate, cognizant beings—"

"I can." Kells interjected with a simple answer, wide black eyes glancing back and forth between the two men in the room.

"See! I've never seen her do that before—"

"It has limitations."

"...Okay, well, thank you for the example, Kells. That's exactly what I still need to study, Great Uncle Ford. Imagine—if I got enough data, I could apply for a grant, we could pool our funding to do even bigger and better things here in Gravity Falls! We can't just let this slip through our hands—you know?" He felt the years-old influence of his slick-talking great uncle Stanley in his words, which for the moment, he was thankful for. Grunkle Stan was a master of persuasion, if perhaps a compulsive liar and con man. Dipper would take what he could get.

"Hmm," Ford frowned, absently rubbing his chin as he contemplated his great-nephew's argument and hopeful stare. "Well, Dipper... you did come here to study the abnormalities of this town. I suppose it wouldn't hurt for you to take a few days off here and there for your own independent study." With a smile, he placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "As long as you don't get too... distracted. You didn't think I would really kick your friend out of the house, did you?"

Friend. Right. "Well, I mean... it is your place. I didn't wanna impose—and I'm sure she didn't want to, either, right Kells?"

"I have never been against being an imposition." The lake spirit in question tore her gaze away from the captivating fish tank. "He wouldn't be able to keep me out if he tried." She stuck her tongue out childishly at Ford, who seemed mildly offended at her sass.

"Hey, now—"

"Kells, _please_ ," Dipper sighed, turning his head as she withdrew, huddling behind his back. "Sorry, Great Uncle Ford. She's... not good with people."

"No, no, I understand. She's still sore that I tried to document her 40 years ago." Kells was silent behind him. Ford must have hit the nail on the head. "Well—I wish you luck, Dipper. And... I'm interested to see what you find." His great uncle gave a knowing nod, which Dipper returned.

"I'll let you get back to your work. If you need any help today just let me know. I'll be around, okay?"

"Of course. Go on now, I expect to see some good research out of this!" Exchanging subtle laughs, Dipper nodded, and the two of them turned to leave through their respective exits. Stepping into the elevator to the surface, he turned to see Kells skip in behind him, just before the door began to close. His eyes caught sight of the aquarium, glowing bright blue, with... with a bloom of red spreading through the water. But the doors were closing, closed now, and as he looked at her companion she smiled sweetly, all innocence and naiveté. A quick flick of her tongue swept away a smear of crimson on her lip. He gave her a withering look.

"It was only a nibble." She clasped her hands behind her back, turning to face the door. "I shan't be doing it again. It tasted terrible."

All summer. This was it. All summer, he would have to babysit her. He couldn't help but feel he'd made a huge mistake.

"You're trouble, Kells," he sighed, shaking his head.

"Yes." She leaned against the wall of the elevator as it moved, smiling pleasantly at him. "But I don't believe that Dipper Pines has ever been good at staying out of trouble."

Ignoring the double entendre that brought a tinge of red to his cheeks, he shrugged, silent for the moment. Mabel was out reconnecting with old friends, and Ford underground in his lab, leaving Dipper and Kells alone for the day. Although he could think of... plenty of things to occupy their time, things that he really, _really_ shouldn't have been thinking of at all, it was time to do a little work delving into her background. Her story of the human girl she'd loved—Rosetta, was it?—if he could place that somewhere on a timeline, and she could approximate the time between then and her earliest memory, he might be able to triangulate the point of her origin... And maybe even scratch the surface of the enigma of her existence.

"Kells, what's your earliest memory?" Dipper asked as he stepped off of the elevator, feeling her hand slip gently into his.

"Oh... that's a good question." She grew quiet as he led her outside, amidst the noontime chatter of cicadas and songbirds, and sat her down on the porch's loveseat. Evidently, she was giving his inquiry a great deal of careful thought.

"I believe... the earliest..." Her fingertips touched her lips in contemplation. "I'm afraid it is nothing special. Just being under the water, staring up at the starry sky through the ripples on the surface. There was... a boat? Wooden. But it was empty, and upside-down. There was no one else around."

That... wasn't encouraging, but he scribbled down the details in a small notepad regardless. It sounded more like a human's first memory than anything; just a random moment in time that managed to stick in her consciousness this long. There was no way to know whether it was actually an origin point, or if she simply couldn't remember any earlier.

"Wait. There's something else. When I was under the water... just before I opened my eyes, there was a flash, fading away. Bright white, or blue... or both...? Mm..." He jotted this down, then glanced up from his notebook to her. Her pitch black eyes stared into the middle distance, misty and searching for something more to give him—some other memory, the key to everything, her brow furrowed in thought and frustration. It looked like it bothered her more than it did him. Actually... it almost looked like it pained her.

"No... I can't remember any more," she sighed in resignation, eyes closing. "I'm sorry, Dipper."

"It's fine, Kells," he offered a smile, his hand hesitating nervously before smoothing a stray lock of hair back into place on her head. "Don't worry. I have some more questions that should help."

"Oh, good... Go ahead—I'll answer anything you need."

"Anything?" Well, he had a few things in mind, but now that she'd promised _anything_... Several varieties of temptations tugged at his mind.

"That's right, you silly boy. Anything you could dream of." With a cheeky smile she pinched his arm, drawing a laugh and a wince from the mystery twin.

"Ow, come on, that's gonna bruise."

"Oh, you think _that's_ a bruise? I'll show you a bruise..." As she raised her hands threateningly, he threw his up in surrender.

"No thanks!"

"Make with the questions or suffer the torture!"

"Okay, okay! Let me think—Kells, stop—!" Dipper begged for mercy from the lake spirit, who had apparently switched gears from bruises to tickling, and went straight for his weak spots. He laughed helplessly, trying desperately to think of a question to make her stop without having to shove her away. There was only one subject that he knew would stop her in her tracks.

"When did—How long h-have you known Bill—?" True to his expectations, she withdrew, giving him a moment to catch his breath. Despite sating his own personal curiosity, this was an important question, one that might help place her—or even the elusive dream demon—on a timeline.

"Mm..." Kells thought quietly, threading her fingers together and unthreading them over and over. "Since I can remember... He's always been here. Well... not since..." She trailed off, delicate little ears folded down unhappily. So much for that question. That was the one answer that gave him very little to work with.

"Of course. S-Sorry... if that was rude."

"Not at all." Although her words were light and kind enough, she still avoided his gaze. "It's okay, my little constellation. It's just been... strange, these past years. With him gone. You know—it's like a childhood tree felled in the night." Her words sounded wistful. It filled him with a strange sense of irritation. This was a demon they were talking about—one who had endeavored to make both of their lives hell, who had stolen his form, ruined countless lives. He'd spent years, hundreds of years, tormenting her. And here she was, reminiscing like she was mourning an old friend?

Evidently, she had caught a glimpse of the unease written on his face. She studied his expression, which he did his best to conceal, though at that point he felt he was an open book to her. After all, as she had said before and as loathe as he was to admit, she was _very_ good at humans.

"I know you don't understand, Dipper." His jaw clenched. That was always it: he "didn't understand". She continued despite his tension.

"It isn't your fault. It's not something you _can_ understand... As a human, your life span is limited, and you don't have the opportunity to forge connections spanning hundreds of years. In that much time... things become complex."

"Hmm." He couldn't help the skeptical note that had worked its way into his noncommittal grunt.

"...No, I already know how you feel. I'm sorry to have digressed—let's resume the topic at hand."

"Yeah…" Dipper did his best to jump his train of thought back onto the tracks. So—if her earliest memory was that underwater glimpse, and a flash of light—it could be a lead. Emphasis on _could be_.

"How long had you lived in the lake before you met Rosetta?"

"Let's see… it must have been… almost a hundred years, but not quite. A few years after she… passed, I was given a centennial celebration."

"A… what?"

"It's rather like a birthday. Humans celebrate that yearly, yes? But since I don't seem to age, once every hundred years is plenty." She smiled weakly, eyes looking down to the pale patches on her knees. "Back then, I wasn't… quite in the mood for it. My next one is coming up, actually: sometime in the next decade, but… I don't know if I'm particularly keen on the idea this time around, either."

This was all news to him. A centennial celebration? Given by who? _Bill?_ Please. Maybe it was the gnomes—she had always been on fair terms with them.

"You don't want to party with the gnomes again? Can't imagine why." He snuck her a sly grin, which she chuckled at. Even when he was young, the pack of little forest men loved nothing more than to try and pester her into accepting a marriage proposal.

"Shockingly, they didn't attend my last soiree. No, I'm afraid I haven't anyone left to invite to my next centennial."

"You have me," he offered with an encouraging smile. "And Mabel, of course."

"Yes... of course." Kells sighed, her own smile fading ever so slowly. Her patchwork hands picked at the hem of the sundress Mabel picked out, smoothing the fabric and creasing it up again with slow, deliberate movements of her fingers.

"Do you... do you know of anything big that happened in the world around the time you were seeing Rosetta? Something that could tell me what year it was?"

"Oh, I don't know..." He could hear the slightest hint of tedium in her voice. "You know, those car machines were beginning to be a regular thing, then. It seemed like everyone was getting one. And... hmm, there was something about a war, in the few years after. You humans have so many wars so often, though."

His pen clicked. If cars were gaining traction as transportation... that placed it somewhere in the early 1900s, when Ford began churning out cars at an affordable price. The pen's end found its way between his teeth, where he gnawed on it in deep contemplation. The war she mentioned—it could be the first world war, placing her memories with Rosetta somewhere around the 1910s, 1920s. If she was a hundred years old by that point... That put her before Gravity Falls was even officially founded. But he needed sources, concrete ones, to corroborate her recollections.

"All right," he announced triumphantly, circling the numbers he'd written prominently on the page: 1820. "I have a rough idea of when you might be from. We'll head to the library to see if we can find any records that can help." He heard no response, and glanced up to find her watching him with a silent, fond gaze; it brought an embarrassed blush to his cheeks. "...What?"

"You. I like to watch you think..." She leaned towards him, lips curling into a mischievous smile as she drew closer. The strap of her dress was loose, hovering just above the dark skin of her shoulder, and it slipped out of place as her hand rested gently on his knee. He swallowed hard.

"You look so handsome when y—" Her wide eyes blinked as his fingers pressed against her lips, pushing her back.

"And you just took a bite out of a live fish." Dipper chuckled, shaking his head. "I'm not gonna kiss you anytime soon, that's gross."

"I—!" Kells began indignantly, a flustered blush on her cheeks that he never had a chance to see much of. He kinda liked it. "Well. Fine, then. You don't have to." Though he expected her to pull away and start pouting, instead he felt her lips on the scruff of his jawline. Then, lower. Lower... her tongue traced along the skin at the base of his neck, sending a shiver through his bones.

"Woah—" he managed to gasp out only a single syllable, feeling the muscles in his throat tense one by one. "Kells..." In response he only received a low, questioning hum, and with her lips pressed against him it felt like an electric current in his blood. He... wasn't complaining. His head tilted back to allow her room and she took full advantage of this movement, nearly climbing on top of him in her eagerness to continue, all hot summer blood and overexcited teeth grazing the shoulder skin she'd revealed with a shift of his t-shirt.

"Dipper..." her timid voice whispered, setting his insides aflame, "You're so soft... so mortal..." Words like that reminded him of what she really was, regardless of the thornless flower she had become.

"AH! Kells! That hurt!" He jumped back, and so did she, blinking innocently.

...Mostly thornless.

"Man..." He rubbed the smarting spot on his shoulder where she'd bit him—even if she didn't have rows of them anymore, her teeth were still plenty sharp enough to leave a proper sting. Glancing down at it as best he could, he sighed at the sight of red crescents where her smile had been, certain that anything she left behind wouldn't escape the notice of his twin sister.

"Sorry... I'm sorry, Dipper," she hurriedly apologized, a frown on her lips. "I, um... I forget how fragile human flesh is..." She swallowed, eyes set on his shoulder where she'd nipped him. He wasn't sure that she hadn't _meant_ to break skin. Older thoughts of kelpies' man-eating habits floated to the surface of his mind.

"You didn't like that?" she asked, her hand resting timidly on his.

"Just not... not that hard, okay?" He could bear a little, if that was what she liked to do. But, man... where had she learned that? Wait—no, he didn't want the answer to that question.

"Okay. I'll be gentle. Sorry," she apologized again, trying on a tentative bud of a smile. He returned it, shaking his head with a quiet laugh.

"Come on, we need to get to the library sometime today. We're burning daylight."

"I didn't hear you complaining a few minutes ago..."

With a roll of his eyes his fingers intertwined with hers, and the two of them were off, leaving a quick note to Ford behind them.

The Gravity Falls library was as sparsely populated as ever. With a carefully tied bandana to cover her ears and a fashionable pair of glittering, Mabel-picked sunglasses for her empty eyes, Kells was ready to pretend to be human as best she could manage, and maybe even help Dipper out a bit while she was at it. She hovered nearby as he browsed the library's history records, picking up a book now and again when she was intrigued by the title, leafing through a few pages then placing it back carefully. It took two hours of poring through page after page, carefully scanning hand-recorded birth and death records and often struggling to read the sweeping cursive, before Dipper finally hit paydirt.

"Look—!" Excited by his discovery, he managed to hush himself at the last moment, waving to Kells as a few patrons cast slightly annoyed glances at him. The lake spirit in question, who had been flipping through a book on witchcraft with the occasional amused scoff, set it back on the shelf and drifted over to him with deliberately quiet footsteps.

"What is it?" she whispered, quickly followed by, "Am I talking too loud?"

"No, you're fine—and look," his finger marked one entry in a list of names. "There she is."

He watched Kells' eyes widen as she saw Rosetta's name there, recorded alongside her birth date, and the year she went missing. Well... "missing". 1913—a concrete date, finally something he could work from!

"About your earliest memory: do you think that could have been your first memory? I mean... maybe the flash you saw was from when you were... born? Or, came to be."

"Maybe." She sat next to him, her eyes still on the aged paper and ink before them. "I remember meeting Bill in the days after. He said then that I was 'new'. So maybe... that was where I came from."

"Right—I think so too. So now we have a window of time where you were born, somewhere around the 1810s or 1820s..." He couldn't help but feel a little triumphant that he'd gotten his hands on evidence of her longevity. One step closer to cracking the code of her existence.

"Okay, what we need now is to see if there's some record of who lived here before it was officially founded... If someone created you, or brought you here, or something—it's possible we could find some proof of that... But that was so long ago, finding those records might be tough..." He chewed on the end of his pen, wondering if there was a better way to proceed from here. The light outside was growing dimmer by the minute, and soon the small-town library would be closed for the evening, leaving him stranded in his research until tomorrow. It would be a shame to pull the brakes on this train, he was on such a roll!

"Wait here, I'm going to ask if they have any records that old. I might be able to get copies of them, and then we can keep our research going back at Great Uncle Ford's, so cross your fingers!" He gave her a grin, but she just nodded in silence, still looking at his notes and the yellowed pages before her.

It was a miracle that they had any birth and death records from that time at all—the fact that they were incomplete put a damper on his spirits, but maybe there was something salvageable from them, after all. With paper copies in hand he gave a quick thank-you to the librarian, straightened up the spot he was working in with Kells' assistance, and the two of them managed to escape the library before sundown.

"This is great, Kells," he smiled like a child that had matched together his first puzzle pieces—though he truly had plenty to go, these were steps in the right direction. Sitting the papers on his steering wheel as she awkwardly climbed into the car (she was still getting the hang of being driven around in an automobile), he gave the names a precursory glance to see if any were familiar enough to be of note.

"You'll have to look at this later and see if it triggers any memories for you. None of these really jump out at me... And I mean, the last page is half-burnt, so there's those names lost to the fire... but we might be able to get something from this, Kells, something real! We could get a good lead on where you came from—" Excited, he looked over at her, but felt his words dry up in his throat when he saw the way she hung her head over her lap, the dark spots of tears soaked into her green sun dress. She was crying, quietly, so silent that he hadn't even heard her, and here he was rambling like an idiot about names and... oh, god, he was so dumb. What did he do wrong?

"What's wrong...? Hey..." His hand brushed along her shoulders. He could feel the curve of her spine and precise slope of her shoulder blades hunched there, shaking beneath his touch. She shook her head, gently at first, then more and more vehemently.

"I..." With a heavy sniff, her hands gripped the sunglasses in her hands tightly, and she looked up at him. "Did I do the right thing...?" Just as he was about to ask what in the world she was talking about, she answered his unspoken query.

"Rosetta—those records, they said she was missing. She was missing. To her family, if she—if she had any friends, the people who cared about her—they never... they never knew she had drowned there. I kept her... Selfishly, I kept her death to myself..." Wiping her eyes messily with the back of her hand, she sobbed there, a pathetic silhouette in Dipper's beaten-down old car. "I never considered... Now I can't stop th-thinking, if she d-died somewhere else, I would have wanted to know—wanted closure—her family, what if they longed for her torturously, regretted every bad word they said, spent so many nights crying as I did but... they had no idea..." Burying her face in her hands, she shook her head again as if cripplingly ashamed of what she'd done. "How cruel... I was so ignorant..."

Dipper had no idea what to say. He felt that, even if he had many years' more experience, this was not something that would be in his repertoire. But he had to try—he had to try something, he couldn't just leave her crying like this, clumsily rubbing her shoulders as if that would fix things. He had to say something, he couldn't take the silence any more.

"Kells, you can't... You can't change what you did all that time ago. I think... you did what you thought was right, and..." No, that was so lame. That was nothing, that wouldn't comfort her if she'd accidentally spilled a glass of milk. Think of something else...

"She... did what she did because... she wanted to be with you, right? I think she would have been happy..." For a brief moment, he considered the absolutely bizarre nature of this conversation. But he had been in stranger. "You said yourself that you felt it was what she would've wanted. Do you still feel that way?" Slowly, she nodded. "Then I think you did what was right. And it was all you could have done back then. You can't change the past, and maybe you'd do things differently now... But that's part of living, right? You grow and change." Kells exhaled, a shaky and bitter laugh tumbling from her lips.

"Listen to you," she sniffled, "talking like a proper adult. You are grown, after all... maybe more than I am." She sat up straight, giving him a hollow smile. "Let's go back. Will you help me with... this thing again?" The lake spirit had yet to understand the way the seatbelt worked, and he nodded obligingly, helping her fasten herself in. The rest of the drive passed in silence, Kells gazing out the passenger window at the setting sun and the sleepy streets of Gravity Falls that flew by as he drove. Lights flickered on one by one, the occasional extravagant neon shining in the glassy reflection of her eyes, and Dipper wondered if he had really cheered her up even half as much as he'd hoped to. The tinny car speakers played the latest summer hit, one he had heard too many times to count (that was apparently brand-new to Gravity Falls), but he couldn't bring himself to turn it off. He was afraid that, if he did, he might hear her crying again.

When they walked through the door to Ford's home, the smell of dinner wafting through the air and the sound of Mabel's excited bustling echoing from the kitchen, Dipper felt a sweet and brief kiss on his cheek. His gaze turned to Kells, who smiled kindly and squeezed his palm, but said nothing. Instead, she turned, slipping from his grasp and heading up the stairs to their shared room.

"What in all the universes did you do to make her so sweet on you?" Ford interjected, causing Dipper to jump in alarm at the sudden figure in the living room doorway.

"Oh my god, Great Uncle Ford," Dipper rubbed his temples, sighing at the low chuckle of his uncle, who sipped his mug of coffee with a small amount of amusement on his features.

"You've gotta quit sneaking up on me like that."

"I was here before you were!"


	9. The Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: This chapter contains mentions of self-harm. It also contains explicit sexual content; if you would like to skip over that, it will be sectioned off by horizontal rule. Anything between these lines can be skipped without missing important details.
> 
> Thank you, and enjoy ❤

The following two weeks passed much like the ones seven summers ago: all too quickly for Dipper's liking. Though he'd asked her to rifle through the copied birth and death records when she was ready to, Kells had soon after informed him that none of the names were familiar at all—so although he had reached one conclusion, there was still plenty of enigma left to solve and no more leads. Kells herself seemed content to sit back and let Dipper alone puzzle over the possibilities. While he was busy helping Ford and asking questions of his mentor, she would run off with his sister, gallivanting around town and giggling between the trees like a summer-stricken schoolgirl. He guessed she was, in a way. This was a long-overdue vacation from her lake-bound prison.

Still, it left him high and dry. He was really no closer to finding Kells' origins than he was when he'd first considered studying her. Something about all of it seemed too... convenient. The records burnt and incomplete, Kells herself unable to remember how she came to be—and bored of searching for the answer to boot—no cryptozoological category that fit her and her abilities... like some kind of Frankenstein's monster of kelpie and a dozen other creatures. He felt like he was trying to solve a puzzle with only half of the pieces, and Ford seemed to think so too, from his repeated assertion that there was "simply not enough data to form any kind of hypothesis or even find a direction to start in". Well, if there was anything Dipper had learned from Gravity Falls, it was that all the answers were there if one looked hard enough.

And scrutinize he did, keeping his usual late nights and later mornings devoted to running his eyes over the same books, new tomes where he could get his hands on them, but still—nothing. Nothing! It was enough to make him long for Bill's twisted, encrypted and eviscerated half-truths. He would settle for half-truths, as long as there was SOME truth to be had at all.

The cracks in his neck as he rolled his shoulders were satisfying, but results would've been better. He sighed wearily, eyes straining to focus on the words before him. They jumped here and there, despite his best efforts to keep them straight—

"You're doing it again," Kells' voice reached him from across the room, and he realized with no small amount of embarrassment that, in a shocking and mutinous twist, his mouth had already begun gnawing on his shirt collar. With a groan he rubbed his dark and tired eyes, as if he could pull an answer from them if he pressed hard enough. The beginnings of a headache threatened behind his eyelids.

"It's time for bed. I won't see you torture yourself anymore," his bunkmate announced matter-of-factly, "You _will_ have a good night's rest."

Grumbling skeptically but with begrudging compliance, he placed his book on the dresser beside him, secure in the knowledge that protesting against Kells would yield no victory. He still had plenty to think about, even if his thoughts just ran in circles. But if she was going to make him lay there and think in the dark, he supposed it was the same as sitting up and thinking in the light.

A click of the lamp left the room swamped in night. The moon offered little illumination from the window, almost waned away by this time and casting a sad excuse for a glow over Gravity Falls through cracks in the clouds. The bedsprings creaked unhappily under the weight of a second person.

"Uh. Wh... What are you doing?" Dipper asked, his question laced with hesitation but striving not to panic at this perfectly normal and benign action from the person Mabel loved to call his "giiiirrrlfriiieennnd". As Kells made herself comfortable in his bed, tucking herself in next to him, her hand patted the pillow behind him to beckon him to rest. He obliged, heart racing.

Since Kells' adventurous bite, the two had done little more than kiss, though to his utter horror and bliss she did enjoy sitting on his lap when she got the chance. When she did, she squirmed far too much for him to keep his mind from a total meltdown. They hadn't shared a bed since the first night she was here, when she innocently cradled his head in her arms as she fell asleep. He had no idea what she was expecting. Mabel was gone for the night and he found himself wishing she were there, if only to take this horrible weight of the unknown off his chest. He tried to look over at her, but could barely make out her features against the darkness.

"We need to talk."

"Wha—ahem, uh, what about?" God, why couldn't his voice just stay where it was supposed to?

"You haven't been sleeping well," she murmured, her fingertips tracing over the birth mark on his forehead. He found his eyes lulled closed by her feather-light touch—maybe this was just another cuddle session to her. That thought took some of the tension from his shoulders.

"No bad dreams recently?" she asked.

"Haven't been remembering my dreams..." he mumbled in response, tired body shifting to find the perfect place to fall asleep.

"Well... no news is good news..." Kells murmured cryptically, falling silent for a moment. "Dipper... You've been sleepwalking."

"I—what?" His eyes opened, straining to see her in the darkness. "Sleepwalking? When? Where? For how long? Did I do something embarrassing—?"

"Don't panic. I've been watching over you, my constellation." Her hand ruffled the fluffy curls that fell over his forehead. "As I will tonight. You haven't done anything embarrassing, silly boy... Just walking around. Standing for a long time, mumbling, though I can't understand anything you say when you do. I'm not surprised that you've been feeling ill-rested."

"Hm..." He didn't like the sound of it. Sleepwalking was not something he had a history of, and suddenly contracting a chronic case was cause for concern, no matter how blithely Kells tried to gloss over it.

"I have a remedy. We'll have to coax you into a deeper sleep."

"Huh? What, you think that'll work?" Dipper was skeptical.

"Mm-hm. I do." She nodded, running a soothing hand through his hair. That was... much more relaxing than anything else she could have come up with.

"Okay... I guess. But if you're trying to get me to do an elaborate ritual with you, or something..."

"Nothing so complicated. You'll only have to lie on your back and relax. I can take care of the rest."

It didn't sound so bad. She'd really worn him down now, with her quiet whispers and her tender fingers combing over his scalp... he could let her chant whatever dead language she wanted to and line him in salt, or orphan's blood, the tears of the dead or whatever. Maybe, if her magic worked, he could even fall asleep inside of one hour tonight. Now _that_ would be a miracle. She nudged him, prompting him to lie on his back as instructed.

Just as he was about to ask what she intended to do, she climbed over him, no doubt to find supplies for... no...? Her spine curved over him, forehead leant gently into his, the shallowest breath she could take now released in the subtlest shudder. His mouth dried up in a hurry. He swallowed hard at the press of her knees on either side of his hips. This wasn't... this couldn't be what... was this a dream? He'd fallen asleep before. While she was whispering so fondly, stroking his hair like some kind of guardian angel, he'd dozed off. This was a dream. It was a dream. He knew it was. He'd had many dreams like this one. But in those dreams, he could breathe.

"You need to stop thinking," she whispered, "I don't know much of human life... But I've learned a lot, with you... Dipper Pines... I've learnt the quickest way to stop all rational and logical thought in the human mind." What was she talking about? Her hands were on his chest and moving slowly downwards. He wasn't sure if he could parse whatever language she was speaking in, though he knew his name, and he knew how much he loved the sound of it coming from her lips, and knew that he didn't remember his dreams having this much detail before.

"It also happens to exhaust you. Which is exactly what... what you need." She was repeating words. Grasping for what she meant to say. Desperate? He liked the sound of it. "This is for you. My constellation... my saving grace, guiding light to the north star... everything is for you, everything. And I will... I will keep going until you tell me... until you want me to stop."

With her soft palms running beneath the hem of his shirt, she may as well have cut out his tongue for how well he could speak. He simply nodded, receiving a gentle and reassuring kiss as a response. Her hands clumsily brushed his loose t-shirt upwards, doing little but revealing his stomach, which his mind chose this moment to feel self-conscious over. He didn't have definition there—didn't have much anywhere, really, and in that moment he found himself viciously regretting each and every late night junk food he'd eagerly devoured in those sleepless final exam nights.

But she hummed in delight as her touch roamed his body, sending vibrations through his cheek where her lips touched down. When she sighed his name, warm breath cascading down to his neck, his trembling hands couldn't keep still any longer—he brought one up to her cheek, and in the palest patches of her skin he could see the heat hidden within them, threatening to overflow. Her hands stopped. Empty eyes locked with his, black holes in the night, threatening to devour his very being into their crushing darkness. It was... romantic. And it was weird that he found it romantic.

She closed her eyes, shaking her head, and his stomach turned as he feared she might stop. Her lips parted and she sunk her head into the crook of his neck, hiding there as if ashamed.

"I used to dream," she whispered—her voice was thick with tears. "Of stars. Of the night sky. Lost, desperately alone in the forests of Gravity Falls, I would look at the stars. They were all different. Alien. But always... I found my constellation." Her fingers pulled his shirt into fistfuls. "Odin's Wain... Humans call it the Big Dipper. And all the other glimmers of light would fall into place, where they were supposed to be all along. Your constellation showed me to the north star, and I followed it... I would follow it home." Pushing herself up once more, she fixed him with a watery gaze, tears threatening to fall to his cheeks. "I never saw it. Home. I don't know where home is, Dipper. But I know... I know you'll take me there. I knew it from the first. I've been waiting... I've waited for a long time..." She sniffed, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. "I always thought—I thought, I would do anything. Anything it took to protect you, keep you safe. So you could take me there. But, I—I don't—Sometimes I think," her voice split down the middle, "With you... I think I'm _already_ there."

"Hey... Kells..." A smile tugged at his lips as his hands cupped her cheeks, one running through her hair in an attempt at comfort. Sweet though it was, he didn't want to see her cry any further, a soft thumb brushing away her tears. "Don't cry, okay? It's all right..."

He'd scarcely finished his words before she kissed him again, fingers winding through his dark curls with the deepest longing he'd ever felt from another. It was difficult, at this point, to ignore the tension between his legs. After an eternity that wasn't nearly long enough for his liking, their lips parted, and a careful smile worked its way into her breathless expression. With a slight nod, she traced his birthmark once more as she spoke.

"Sorry... I got carried away. I'm afraid looking at you does that to me now and again. Mm..." she sighed, nuzzling his cheek, followed by a quiet giggle. "Your cheeks are prickly. But the rest of you is so soft..."

"Is that a good thing?" Dipper asked, sighing with a touch of exasperation at being called "soft". It was almost as bad as being called "cute".

"Yes," she chirped in delight, pinching his cheek gently. Oh, so she was teasing him now. Good, great. "I like it. Because I like _you_." Warmth flushed his cheeks, and he exhaled in a quiet laugh.

"And I like you." His gaze flickered over her features, lined in the weak moonlight, hand giving her ear the gentlest flick.

* * *

"Thank goodness," she laughed, "Otherwise, it would make what I'm about to do a little awkward..."

"What—" When he glanced down to realize what her hands were doing, a whispered "—Oh," immediately followed, hips twitching reflexively as her fingertips grazed beneath the elastic band of his boxers. To his surprise, she didn't bother removing his clothes. As her kisses wandered down and settled on his throat, her hand crept inside, the fairy-light touch on his inner thigh drawing a whimper from him that he desperately stifled.

This was new. Entirely new to him—he wasn't a _virgin_ , no, not a virgin, but... Maybe he _kind of_ was... Halfway...?

He was grateful that she'd completely taken the reins. Strangely... she seemed at home there, knelt over his trembling body and nudging his shorts downward just enough that she could trace her fingertips along his stiff length. The careful touch pulled a groan from his lips, which he tried unsuccessfully to cover with a hand, praying that no one but her could hear.

Heat coursed beneath his skin. She worked him in earnest, now, his body twisting beneath her, mouth open and gasping for breath at the ache between his legs. It didn't help that she was whispering his name between breaths, sharp teeth nibbling oh so gently at his earlobe, if he glanced down he could see the slope of her shoulders and curves of her chest beneath her shirt, the shallow and deliberate breaths she took thick with lust and wanting. Wanting... she wanted him, and he... he wanted...

Though his hands had been gripping the sheets, they reached up, trembling just barely with the nervous thrill of running beneath her clothes. The feel of her smooth skin, the way her stomach shivered as he grazed it—it was too much, too perfect, and part of him felt he was still in a dream. But no dream matched the intricacy of this. No dream could begin to approximate the arch of her spine under his roaming fingertips, the feverish high that left him light-headed and gasping for air, the twisting electricity in his stomach like a sucker punch to the gut and the knowing movements of Kells' fingers as if she could play him like a fine instrument.

And truly, she could. She coaxed sounds to the surface that he'd never expected to hear from his own lips, cries that were far too loud for his liking, not that he had time to worry about that while her hands were on him and he was aching, twitching in her grasp. His moans mixed with the whispers of sweet nothings she left in his ear, heated and at times another language, one far beyond any he knew.

"I need you... Dipper, I need... You're my..." A particularly keen cry escaped him, drowning out her words—he couldn't take much more of this, she kept pulling him to the edge and slowing down—

A voice from downstairs.

"Dipper? Everything all right? I'm going to be in my study for the rest of the night," his great uncle called up the stairs. Mercifully, Kells stopped, shifting away from him to allow a response.

"Yes! Yeah—! Everything's fine, uh, n—" his voice was already breaking, the lake spirit in bed with him tugging down his boxers, what in god's name, no, NO— "N-night, Great Uncle Ford!" His voice jumped an octave as her hot tongue ran up his cock, carving a path through the already-slick precum. His hand flew to his mouth, muffling his moan and subsequent gasp, words still leaking through his fingers.

"Kells—! Oh, god, god damn it—" Propped up on her elbows, one hand holding him steady and the other on his thigh, she began the torturous process all over again, kissing and tasting him at leisure. It was enough to make him want to beg. He shook, sweat running down his legs and a crimson blush beneath his skin.

"Please, Kells... Please..." If he had any shreds of dignity left they were bowled over by the sensation of her lips slipping slowly over his tip, the gentle hum of a moan against his wet skin, in no hurry to get him off. This was what she meant. This was what she meant by exhausting him, well, god was it working, he was wound tight as a coil—

"AH! C-careful," he gasped, hips jerking, "Wa-watch the teeth..." As he might have feared, were he in his right mind, her shark-like teeth were difficult to keep out of the way when taking him into her mouth—difficult, but not impossible. She moved more carefully, whimpering desperately into his erection as if she wanted him deep somewhere else.

Just the thought was enough. It unexpectedly pushed him over the edge, warmth melting through his body, muscles tensing as a final cry fled from him. He bit down on his knuckles, trying to smother his remaining gasps as a few more spasms of pleasure rocketed through him—his head was spinning. It was... far more intense than he was used to... Kells had managed to pull away at the last moment, though unfortunately that left her throat and cheek covered.

"Oh..." Dipper panted as he glanced down at her, "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry... let me..." Fumbling for a tissue, he leaned forward to clean her up, and she sat obediently still for his attention. Still breathing hard, he rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed in exhaustion. He had to... he wanted to tell her something, something he had been saving; he wasn't sure if he should say it, still not sure, maybe it was too fast, but with the high in his veins he thought this might be the only chance he had not to talk himself out of it.

* * *

"Kells..."

"Mm," she passively acknowledged him, stroking his hair again; it was enough to put him to sleep.

"I love you," he mumbled, the words barely intelligible but all he could manage. Even now in the high of the afterglow, it was so hard to be the first to say it, so hard to pull the words from deep within himself... He felt his head pulled forward into a deep kiss, her tongue pushing fervently into his mouth—his caressed hers in turn, and as it did she gave a high-pitched mewl that sent shivers down his spine. Her hand grasped his, their lips parting reluctantly as both of them took a moment to catch their breath. She smiled, looking exhausted herself.

"Tired?" she asked, coaxing a dumb nod from Dipper. "Lay down, my constellation. It's time to rest your weary head."

"Can I..." the words left his mouth before he realized what it was he was saying—an embarrassed blush blossomed over his cheeks. Now he had to finish... "Can I hold you?"

She sighed sweetly, gifting him with a look of the purest adoration. It made him smile despite his embarrassment. "Of course, my angel. Whatever you like."

"Angel? That's kind of a stretch." he chuckled, reclining, and was pleased to feel her lay next to him, head nestling into his shoulder.

"No," she hummed, her arms snaking around his neck as she planted a gentle smooch on his cheek. "It's perfect."

He couldn't help but pull her in closer. For all his self-consciousness, his second-guessing and anxiety, he'd managed to find a place of solace inside her. Somewhere he could quiet his buzzing mind (even if it was usually buzzing over her) and just... be. Just exist next to her, feeling the slow pattern of her breath, the beating of her heart close to his, watching the drops of moonlight collected on her hair. It was comfort, it was sweetness. It was home. Maybe... they had both found it. Finally.

"Dipper..." Her voice was so far away. And he was so tired. Maybe he could just pretend he hadn't heard... "Dipper! Dipper, stop! Stop it!" Wait... what? What was he doing? His eyelids fluttered open. The kitchen? He was standing. A cold wave of dizziness and dread surged through him, and he swayed, falling back into the refrigerator. Something clattered to the ground. He heard crying. He was hurting—what was hurting? His arm? A weight moved him to the nearest chair. Oh, that was Kells. She was sniffling. Why did his arm hurt so much? A glance down showed plenty of bright red. That was why. Wow... A lot of blood. Was it his?

"Oh, god, Dipper, I'm so sorry," Kells was sobbing, using the nearest hand towel to soak up the blood flowing freely from his forearm. "I should have—sh-should have stopped you, sooner, I..." she whimpered, gently sponging his wound. Her hands were shaking badly—or was it his? He couldn't tell. Where was he, again? The kitchen—yes, the kitchen, the shack, Gravity Falls. Yes. It was dark still. Everything was in its proper place, except the two of them. No, wait... there was something on the ground. Gleaming metal covered in dark red. What... what the hell had he just been doing...?!

Finally getting a grip on himself, his eyes flickered to the much cleaner cut on his arm as Kells rinsed the towel in the sink, getting ready for round two of cleansing. Blood blossomed across his skin still, pooling in dewdrops along the three lines. Three lines. Three points. A triangle.

"Kells," his voice was tremulous as he spoke, "What is this?"

"You hurt yourself," her light footsteps crossed the wooden floor, and she wiped her overflowing eyes with the back of her hand. "I'm sorry—this is my fault, I should have been more careful... I never expected..." The towel smarted on his open skin and he hissed, wincing despite her attempts to move more and more carefully.

"What is this, Kells..." he asked again, looking at her as she bit her lip anxiously. She wasn't eager to speak, her eyes flickering back and forth nervously. "This isn't just sleepwalking. This is something else. Kells, tell me what's going on! What's happening to me?!"

"I don't know!" she finally burst, dropping the pink wash cloth to bury her face in her bloody hands. "I don't know... but I can feel it... since you came here, the way the breeze moves, the flights of the birds—I tried to keep you safe, but I..." Sobs wracked her body. His blood had stained her white clothes.

"I'm sorry," she whined hoarsely, "I'm sorry, Dipper..."

"We have to tell Ford—"

"No!" Kells sat up suddenly, gripping his hand. "No, please, he couldn't help if he wanted to—please, trust me—"

"This is more important than whatever you have against my uncle! If—if this means... what I think it means, then..."

"Listen—we don't, we don't know what it is yet! Okay? Please, Dipper, please. Let us keep this between ourselves for now. If... if things escalate any further, then we can tell your uncle. And Mabel, too. But for now, I just... I need this to stay quiet... I need to find a way to fix this for you. Please..." Her heartfelt pleading budged his resolve, and though he eyed her suspiciously, he acquiesced with a sigh once her hand gripped his.

"Fine... But at the first signs of anything new, we tell them."

"Thank you, my constellation, thank you..." She kissed his forehead with a relieved sigh, moving across the room to rummage through the cabinets. "Where do you keep your bandages?"

"On your left... no, your other left," he instructed, waiting patiently for her to return with them and patch him up. This... this was an unsettling development. And he had no idea why she was so bent on keeping everyone else out of it. As her clumsy hands did the best they could to care for him, he watched her teary expression—she was clearly shaken by the experience, perhaps more even than he was—so... why did he still feel like she was hiding something?


	10. ELOOLVEDFN

He tugged the sleeves of his jacket over the clean, white bandages Kells had helped him with, the secrecy of it all leaving a bad taste in his mouth. Despite her best efforts to get him to sleep well (and he did mean _best_ —he wasn't complaining by a long shot), the dark circles beneath his eyes persisted over the next few days. She had been pulling every trick in the book to try to lure him into a restful sleep: spending the night with her arms around him such that he couldn't wander off (much to Mabel's delight), crafting her own ancient version of a dream-catcher to hang above his bed, cleansing the room again and again, performing bizarre rituals and spells before he went to bed (though thankfully none of them involved anything too questionable). Although he hadn't gotten worse, and hadn't been injured again, he certainly hadn't gotten any better. He routinely slipped out of her grasp for unconscious nightly wanderings.

Kells had even enlisted the help of Mabel this morning (while leaving out some sordid details), desperate for some human wisdom or invention that would keep him in bed long enough to "have a proper night's sleep". Apparently, even his sister had known about his sleepwalking before he did.

"You know what? I think I know what'll help," Mabel chimed, teasing her short curls with a comb in the mirror. Kells' ears perked up, quivering slightly in excitement.

"Really?! Oh, my duckling, if it works then I will owe you twenty charms! What is it?" The lake spirit scooted forward eagerly on her bed.

"Dip-dop is always working himself too hard! You know?" Dipper glanced over his book as Mabel spoke, and rolled his eyes at Kells' earnest nod in reply. "What he really needs is a little vacation! Some time away from all that scholarly jazz. A picnic would be nice, right? Ooh, and it can be just you two, a romantic getaway by the lake—eee! It's perfect!"

"What's a pic—"

"I'll get it all ready, don't you even worry about it! You'll love it, Kells—I mean, it'll relax Dipper too! He won't have anything to worry about, for once! Especially if," she leaned over to nudge Kells suggestively, "you hook him up with a little _summer lovin_ ', if you know what I mean?"

"MABEL! Oh my god, you're so embarrassing!" Dipper groaned, face-planting into his book. Mabel laughed at her brother's response, having heard this before too many times to count.

"You know you love it! You two are the perfect ship!"

"...Ship?" Dipper glared over the pages of his book as she returned to her primping.

"Come on, you know what that is. Like, short for a relationSHIP! I set you out on a ship of relations! I christen thee: the Dips 'n Kells!"

"...Yeah, okay, but you also 'shipped' Kells and—"

"Oh my god, Dipper! What do you want from me? Kellsie is just, inherently shippable! Look at this face!" So saying, she grabbed Kells by the cheeks, turning her head to face Dipper so that he could see how completely and utterly correct she was. He had to laugh at the absurdity of the situation and at Kells' bemused smile struggling between the way Mabel was squishing her cheeks together.

"I mean, I even ship her with ME!"

"Wait, _what_?" Dipper jolted, sending an accusing look to his twin—she laughed again, releasing the hapless Kells from her grasp.

"C'mon, I'm not gonna _steal_ her away from you," she rolled her eyes, "I've already got a hot, mysterious blonde to check out. Besides, you two are too cute together! I'm totally here for you hooking up."

Dipper decided not to point out the fact that Mabel had stolen several of his crushes away from him already, or that he and Kells had already hooked up, unbeknownst to her. Kells herself, looking pleasantly confused by the entire conversation, crossed the room to sit next to Dipper on his bed.

"What's a... pick-nick?" she asked awkwardly, hiding the question behind her hand from Mabel. He chuckled.

"It's where you take a meal, usually a lunch, outside. You put a blanket on the ground and eat there. Usually you have sandwiches, I guess." He tried to tie it into something else she had learned about recently—and happily, her eyes lit up at the connection.

"Oh! I like those! The sweet ones, with the fruit and butter. Yes?"

"That's right." He nodded, a hand patting her on the head; she looked delighted at the attention. "Those are called peanut butter and jelly sandwiches."

"I still don't understand how they make butter from peanuts. Butter comes from milk, not seeds. Can you... can you milk a nut?" Across the room, Mabel smothered her raucous laughter with her hands, shoulders trembling from the effort.

"I'll... I'll have to get back to you on that," Dipper answered Kells, voice trembling as he tried not to laugh himself. Yeah... maybe a picnic would be nice, after all. He doubted it would get him to sleep better, but it would be a nice break from helping Ford and working on his own projects. "All work and no play", and all that.

"Okay. We'll take a trip to the lake, yeah? Sound good?" Kells bounced excitedly on his bed at the news, bounding out of the room soon after with a handful of day clothes. He chuckled at her enthusiasm.

Before he knew it she was skipping along beside him down the path to the lake, jostling the picnic basket a little too much in her delight. The noontime sun was high and bright, flooding into each crack and crevice, bleaching the color from Gravity Falls like it came from an overexposed roll of film. Dipper watched her with a peaceful amusement, glad to see her reveling in the warmth, so full of joy. He'd seen enough of her tears, lately. She deserved a break as much as he did.

Even so, he could tell it was strained. A good portion of her smile and cheer were genuine—but there was a touch of saccharine to her sweetness today. She was... trying to make him happy. She wanted his worries left behind, even if just for a little while, as she worked to find him a cure. Though she thought he hadn't seen it, he knew she slipped a tome into the basket along with their meal.

"Watch out, you're gonna mess up our sandwiches!" he laughed as she did a particularly elaborate spin, nearly tripping over a branch on the ground.

"Oh—a fine thing, I could have fallen and hurt myself and you're worried about the sand witches!" Her pronunciation was still a little off, but he couldn't bring himself to correct it. It was too cute.

"You still haven't told me about how they milk peanuts, either."

"Come on, Kells, I don't know everything. Some stuff you're gonna have to look up yourself."

"Nope! You're my en... encycle... peter," her voice tapered off as she realized she didn't know the word she'd so eagerly begun.

"What? What was that, again? Can you repeat that?"

"You know what I meant!" Kells pinched his shoulder with an embarrassed laugh, looping her arm in his.

"No, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure you just invented a new word." He glanced down at her—just beneath the wide brim of her sun hat, he could see her cheeks puffed out in mock frustration. He pulled his arm from hers and instead let it rest around her waist, bringing the slightest blush to his cheeks that he tried to ignore. She, however, seemed comfortable as could be in his grasp, scooting in to walk closer beside him.

"There. Now you can't run around and toss our food everywhere."

"Dipper!" She scolded, laughter in her voice. Finally they came upon the lake shore—not alone by any means, but a few clips down the shore they found a spot in the shade, obscured by a bit of underbrush.

"Perfect," Kells declared as Dipper laid out the blanket. It was almost cool here beneath the tree's branches... The breeze was warm, rustling the leaves and letting little sparkles of sunlight shine through to her skin as she watched the swimmers and boaters out on the waves. Even with her human form, she really did look... Otherworldly. With the white patches sprawled across her dark sienna skin, the lightness of her hair—even in a diverse crowd, she stuck out like a sore thumb.

But he liked it. He was never one for normalcy.

She was busily unpacking their lunch when he leaned down, lifting up the brim of her hat and placing a kiss on her forehead. Stunned, she stared at him as color filled her cheeks.

"What?" He straightened up, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "Uh... was that weird?"

"No!" Kells protested quickly, giggling. Tugging him down by the hand, she returned his kiss on the cheek, a radiant blush decorating her smile. He folded his legs beneath him and looked over the smorgasbord Mabel had lovingly prepared for them: sandwiches (his and Kells' favorites, of course), a little salad and bite-sized vegetables, cookies for dessert. It was sweet, really. He'd have to remember to thank her some way or another.

"What's this?" Kells had pulled another brown bag from the little basket; drawn on the side in Mabel's flowery handwriting was a note, accompanied by several elaborate doodles. "Enjoy responsibly!" ...It was even punctuated by hearts. Kells reached inside, and Dipper was gripped by a chilling premonition that this wasn't just another snack.

And he was right.

"Hmm?" The puzzled lake spirit pulled out a small square, linked to several others. "What is this...? More snacks...?"

"NO! God, seriously, Mabel?!" Dipper snagged the bag and its contents from her, shoving the condoms back into the bag. Wait—what else was in here?! A bottle of—okay, nope, that was that, and he was just going to tuck it right back in the basket, where it belonged. Forever.

"Wait, what is it? Dipper?" Kells' confusion had been multiplied by his reaction, which he was now regretting. "You don't like those snacks?"

"They're not snacks," he sighed, ever the put-upon twin. "Listen—don't worry about it, okay? Let's have lunch. I'm starving."

"Good! We have plenty of food to fill that empty hole you call a stomach." He was glad she decided to let it go; probably still trying to smooth any bump in the road. He wasn't complaining. As long as he didn't have to explain to Kells how condoms and lube worked, today would be a great day. Any sense that he should thank Mabel for the basket had burnt up with annoyance; he made a note to get on her case about those little presents later.

The afternoon passed gently, ebbing away like the lapping of the lake against the shore. Once their bellies were full of Mabel's passable cooking (okay—to be fair, it was all pretty good, definitely better than he could have come up with), the two of them spent some time watching the citizens and tourists of Gravity Falls on the lake, all manner of summertime fun to be seen. Though the sun was overbearing on a cloudless day, sitting in the shade with her was a treat all its own.

He rested his head on her shoulder, taking a moment to close his tired eyes. She let him doze, content to stroke his tangled brown curls like petting a darling cat.

"You can rest if you want to," she murmured in his ear, her voice as soft and soothing as the waves before them. "I'll watch over you, my constellation."

"Yeah," he sighed, a tired smile on his lips. "I know you will."

His hair was soft, fluffy in her grasp, and she leaned her head on his with a gentle sigh. Perfect, for this moment in time—everything was perfect. She couldn't have been happier. A warm day, laughter in the distance, the Pines twin falling asleep at her side... there was nothing left to ask for. Her gaze flickered over to the basket, where her book rested, as well as that strange package Dipper had acted so sensitive over. She couldn't reach it... although she needed to work on finding him a cure for his sleepwalking (at the very least), and that brown bag warranted further investigation, waking him up wasn't a risk she was about to take. He needed his rest. Besides... he looked like an angel when all that stress melted away from his features.

Maybe a break was what she needed, as well. Distracting him from his worry was exhausting, and a full-time job to boot. A little mental vacation seemed like a nice way to recuperate—and so, she let her mind wander while he slept on her shoulder, hands fiddling idly with the hem of her mint green dress. She turned her palms up. The marks were still there, pale diagonal ridges across the broadest part of her hand, and though they no longer needed bandages, they were a persistent reminder of the price of this borrowed time. Borrowed time... that's what it was, after all. A heavy feeling settled in her chest, which she tried to push away with thoughts of how nice this afternoon had been, how sweet it was of Dipper to come with her, the way he looked at her when he thought she couldn't see. A soft sigh left her; he was a treasure, truly. He deserved better than... this.

He stirred drowsily on her shoulder, roused by the sound of raucous children in the water, and she glanced down to him. Well, he'd gotten a good half-hour of rest, at least. It was the best she could hope for.

"How are you feeling? Still sleepy?" she whispered, her hand stroking his shoulders with the gentlest touch she could muster. He swayed a little, no response forthcoming—he must have fallen asleep hard. Well, that wasn't a bad thing.

"Dipper? You can go back to sleep if you like." Her fingertips moved to his scalp, where she teased at a curl beneath the edge of his hat. His eyes flickered open, blinking slowly in the blinding light of the cloudless day. He smiled, though not at her, as he stared across the shining lake water.

His head swiveled to face her, eyes lit up. She tried to coax a smile of her own to the surface, though somehow... this was... The rictus grin on his face widened. His gaze was fixed on her and her alone, leaning closer as she inched away.

"Oh, man," he finally spoke, far too loudly for their proximity, "am I glad I left that back door open!"

The color drained from her face. His voice was out of sync with his lips, like a bad ventriloquist performance as he flexed his hands: open, closed, open. Closed.

"Long time no see, Puddles!"

Her mouth was impossibly dry. She stared at his all too elated smile, gaze flickering from his teeth to his eyes as if one take would be different, suddenly in the blink of an eye he would go back to normal. He would be her little Dipper again. This wasn't possible. This couldn't be happening. She was going to vomit.

"Yeesh, what is this, a funeral? No one's died yet, doll! We can remedy that soon, don't worry, but first things first—where'd you get this human skin? Bargain bin at a secondhand shop? Jeez, you even crammed those long fingers of yours into this crummy little flesh suit's stubs. What gives?"

"What are you doing here?" her voice was quiet, tremulous, and he reached up to clumsily remove her sunglasses. Still getting used to the body. His hand twitched as he tried spinning the shades by their arm.

"What? Isn't it obvious? I'm here for _you_!" Like a kid in a candy store, he tossed his temporary toy aside, rummaging through the picnic basket instead. She let him—any moment he wasn't looking at her was a blessing. His gaze held none of Dipper's warmth and kindness; those dilated pupils cut through her like a laser through diamond.

"Yeah, I thought it was about time—oh ho, what do we have _here_?" His hand closed around the brown bag, and with a peek inside he erupted into laughter. Kells felt nothing but irritation at the sound, coupled with the frustration that she still didn't know what was inside that was so hilarious. It must have been written all over her face, as the unnatural grin on his face stretched even further once he looked back to her.

"That's right, you don't even know what this is! Oh, man, this is too funny. Too vanilla! They probably haven't even heard of the sick stuff you're into, huh?"

"Bill! WHY are you here?!" Seizing him by the shoulders, she forced him to face her. Even after seven years, his shit-eating grin hadn't wavered for one second. "Get out of Dipper's body, he has nothing to do with—with _whatever_ you're up to now—" In a quick moment her back hit the ground, his hands pressing her shoulders into the earth.

"Don't get too excited, toots. Wouldn't want to attract attention..." He gave a sharp inhale, leaning all his weight on one wrist and drawing a pained whimper from Kells. "What's wrong with this body _now_? Oh, riiight," he chuckled, eyes on Dipper's bandaged arm. "How'd you like my little message? Did you get the... point? HAHA!"

"It's NOT funny, _William_ ," Kells scowled, gritting her teeth. Once again, he was leading her around in circles, directing her across a tightrope over shark-infested waters of his own design. And he relished every second of it.

"Ahh, you're no fun anymore. I saw your light summer reading in that basket, too. _De Exorcismis_?Really? I didn't even know they made an expanded edition. The things you miss on vacation, huh?"

"It isn't expanded. I added my own notes."

"Wow, Pine Tree is really rubbing off on you! Listen, sweet cheeks," he placed a hand on her jaw, holding her in place that she looked directly into his wide eyes. "You sure did make it hard for me to get back here, don't think I didn't notice. Really put your nose to the grindstone while I was gone—I like it! Showing some initiative! But it's time to stop pretending. You're gonna start giving this poor kid ideas! He already thinks he loves you—isn't that kind of cruel?"

Kells felt her face heat up, tears stinging behind her eyes. She knew it. She knew Bill would come along, snap his fingers, and ruin everything. Her efforts had only borrowed time. As always. Regret had already eaten up her heart in the days since Dipper had confessed his feelings—she'd never meant for him to... to really _love_ her... She was going to be his summertime distraction, easily forgotten once he returned home and a pretty human girl caught his eye. Someone else he could really _be_ with.

She couldn't have failed her objective more miserably.

"Classic Puddles," Bill grinned, enchanted by her tears, "Nice to see you haven't changed _that_ much since I've been gone. Still a real crybaby! But don't worry—I'm here to take all this weight off your shoulders. A little more time and you won't ever have to look at Pine Tree again."

"What? Bill, I'll die before I let you do anything to him—"

"Oh, not to him!" His teeth clenched, shoulders tensing. "Already waking up? That was quick. Kells bells, next time we meet, you're coming with me. It's time to collect." Laughter dripped from him, bubbled over, infected his words with a mocking insincerity. "I'll give you a chance to say your goodbyes! Isn't that sweet of me?"

She could no longer resist the urge. Her arm struggled out from beneath him and a sharp crack rang across the lake—though she was satisfied at the blossom of red across his cheek, a pang of guilt sullied her relief as she realized he was in Dipper's body after all. Bill, far from put off by the violence, laughed giddily and leaned further into her.

"Doll, you missed me that much? Don't get ahead of yourself, though, I can't feel anything through this stupid puppet—we can make up for lost time later. It's really been too long!" He pressed his forehead against hers, wide, unblinking eyes breaking her composure into pieces. "Soon, Kells. Soon."

As his eyes closed, she felt rivers of her own tears trickling down the sides of her face. Seven years without so much as a wayward breeze... Now he deigned to grace her with his presence, and it was... _this_. She didn't know why she ever expected—no, even hoped for, anything more. She should have known better.

And now... Dipper's warm brown eyes flickered open sleepily, and it took him several moments to register that he was situated neatly on top of her rather than where he'd fallen asleep. At her tortured expression, he began to panic.

"What—Did I—"

"No," Kells cut him off, affixing him with a morose gaze. "It wasn't you."

"I..." His hand brushed against his tingling jaw, and he was rewarded for his efforts with a sharp sting. "Agh! ...What happened to my cheek?"

"Dipper... I know how to cure you."


	11. sessapserT ruO sU evigroF

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains fairly graphic body horror. Please proceed with caution if that is a concern.

"So you're saying—he possessed me? Again?!"

"It is not that straightforward," Kells answered, stacking books into her arms and heaving them onto the nearby table. "You haven't been possessed again, lovely. This is a different manner of manipulation, similar to... to one of those dolls on strings."

"A marionette?" Mabel chimed in helpfully, rewarded by a nod and a pat on the head from Kells.

"That's the word, yes. He's able to control you remotely through some kind of link, a string he left behind, only when you're unconscious or otherwise vulnerable."

"So, I'm a puppet. You know, it pretty much sounds like last time—"

"No, she's right, Dipper. If it's a means of remote control when you're unconscious, it's a different matter than his completely taking control of your body as a vessel. Similar, perhaps, but not the same." Kells gave no indication that Ford had even spoken, which the present company took to mean she didn't object to his assessment.

"And... you can cut him off from that, right? Kells?" Dipper looked to her imploringly as she took her seat, poring over what she'd extracted from Ford's library. It was a moment before she replied, too deep in concentration to give Dipper the benefit of a kind gaze.

"I can."

"Good—good..." he muttered, mind already racing elsewhere as he paced back and forth. Mabel watched him with concerned brown eyes, her gaze occasionally lowering to the left forearm where she'd seen Bill leave his mark.

"Why is he even trying so hard to come back?" Dipper suddenly asked, the first time the question had been posed that evening. The three humans in the room looked simultaneously to Kells for the answer, who shriveled beneath the attention.

"I, um," she cleared her throat, "I'm not... sure. It doesn't matter, anyway—I'll be getting his claws out of you, and that will be that."

"And how do you propose we do that?" Ford came forward, not a small amount of suspicion in his tone. Kells cast a brief but resentful glance at him.

"Carefully," she answered, "And I will be assuming all of the risk. You three only need do as I instruct you."

The room was quiet but for the turn of Kells' pages and the restless pacing of Dipper. Something about his jittery manner seemed unconvinced at the spirit's reassurance, and she seemed to take notice of this, glancing up at Dipper now and again as if monitoring him to ensure he wouldn't burst. The tension in the room—between Ford and Kells, between Kells and Dipper—was driving Mabel up the wall. She couldn't take the quiet. Maybe Dipper and Kells just needed a little alone time to talk about things? Yeah! Just a little!

"Me and Grunkle Ford, uh... we're gonna go... get us some snacks! We can't do all this crazy demon stuff on an empty stomach, right? Yeah—c'mon Fordsy!" Mabel gave a pointed look to Dipper and grabbed her great uncle by the arm, dragging him to the elevator in response to the study's heavy atmosphere.

"Mabel darling, would you nab my supplies from upstairs as well?" Kells asked, tracing a light finger along the paper as she read.

"Sure thing! Be back in a few!"

Aside from her request, Kells hadn't really acknowledged that the other two left the room, leaving Dipper to pace his anxiety off while the lift rattled upwards. He approached the table Kells' book rested on, laying a hand down in an attempt to catch her eye. She glanced up to him, then looked back down.

"You're too fretful. I will have you right as rain before sundown."

"Listen, it's not just me I'm worried about."

"Then what is it?"

Dipper's hands flew up to his fluffy mop, tugging at his curls in exasperation.

"You! I'm worried about you, Kells. You've been too quiet since I woke up and you still haven't told me why my cheek was hurting. It's because you slapped me, wasn't it? What did he... What did he do to you?"

"Oh, Dipper... you're so sweet." Her expression softened as she read, though she couldn't bring herself to look him in the eye. "He didn't do anything out of the ordinary. I just lost my temper... it's been too long since I've seen him. I forgot how... abrasive he is."

"You would... tell me if something bad really did happen, wouldn't you?" He knelt next to the table, looking up at her imploringly in an attempt to catch her gaze. Something felt so off about every bit of this situation, he couldn't shake the paranoia crawling under his skin. Finally, she graced him with a glance, a reluctant smile at her lips.

"Of course." Her eyes were back on her reading in the next moment. "Please trust me, my constellation."

"I do... Kells, I really do, but I just—there's something about this. Why does he even want to return in the first place? We completely ruined his plans seven years ago, Great Uncle Ford even imprisoned him in another dimension to make sure he wouldn't return. It must have taken a ton of effort to escape, to find a way back, and for what? The stars aren't—aligned anymore, or whatever, like they were before. You know?"

"I know. His strings aren't perfectly drawn anymore, nor are his plans precise. I don't believe he has any more business with Gravity Falls as a whole..."

"So why _is_ he here?"

Kells fell silent for several seconds, eyes immobile as she stared a hole into the paper before her.

"...I don't know."

The elevator door clattered open, unleashing the wave of junk food Mabel had kidnapped from the kitchen.

" _Now_ we're ready to exorcise a demon!" she declared, arms full of every snack imaginable—or at least, everything they had in the pantry upstairs. Given that two young adults, a spirit, and a reclusive scientist dwelled there, it was a generous variety. "Aaand, your things, Kells! Are you really gonna need all this stuff?" Ford carried the bag full of Kells' supplies, heaving it onto the floor. She'd amassed quite a collection in the time she was away from the lake.

"Not all of it, but asking you to bring it all here was quicker than making a list for you. Thank you, starlight," she answered, thanking Mabel specifically and ignoring Ford's contribution. He huffed somewhat at the slight, but she paid no mind despite the apologetic smile Mabel gave him.

"So, these rosaries. _De Exorcismis_. I didn't peg you for a Catholic," Ford remarked dryly, crossing his arms. "You really think this will work?"

"Stanford Pines, you know shockingly little about this universe for someone who spent years studying it. Such is the plight of a human with only Bill as their otherworldly guidance." Dipper thought he picked out a note of... irritation in her voice. It wasn't something that he heard often. "The Abrahamic God and its hierarchy specialize in the opposition, removal, and destruction of demons and what they consider 'evil'. They are the ones to consult when dealing with a problematic entity, just as you would ask a carpenter to a barn raising or a tailor to a fitting. No, I don't think this will work—I _know_ it will." She closed her book and stood, shoulders back and void-like eyes boring straight into Ford. Dipper felt a chill run down his spine. Had... had it gotten colder in the last few seconds, or was the air so thick it was sucking all the energy from the room?

"Stanford. I would like to speak to you privately." Though Dipper and Mabel were silent in the wake of the suddenly imposing presence she had, Ford seemed unruffled by it. He'd been dealing with imposing otherworldly figures for most of his life, after all.

"Very well. Lead the way."

In a secluded branch of his study, far enough to be out of earshot of either of the young twins, Kells crossed her arms as she looked up to Ford. This must have been the first time she'd ever looked at him this long; largely, she did her best to pretend that he was an annoying shadow in an otherwise lovely home. He was a tired old man, permanent circles under his eyes from long nights at his desk and deep wrinkles in his forehead from his unrelenting worry and concentration. She wondered if Dipper might end up looking like him one day. The thought was... unsettling. Aging was a frightening concept.

"I'm not fond of you," she began promisingly, her voice nearly a whisper, "And I know you aren't particularly keen on me. That is why I must ask this of you. I thought of asking Mabel—but she's far too attached to me. I know you will do whatever it takes to keep Dipper safe, even if it means sacrificing me. No hesitation. That is key."

"...What are you planning? Do you really think all this faith healing nonsense will have any effect on him?"

"You of all people should know how close magic and your human notion of 'science' are. This is not healing through belief alone—it is a methodology just as concrete as any of your machines. The fact that you cannot measure the power of the spirit in specific units is of no concern to me. Now, _listen_. The only thing that will keep Dipper safe is the circle I am going to draw. As long as he is within that circle, no harm will come to him, do you understand?" She paused to see him nod. "As I said... I will be taking on the dangers here. You and Mabel are contributing energy to me, but I have specifically constructed this ritual to ensure I am the only one directly in harm's way should something go awry. Knowing who we are dealing with, something _will_ go awry. It is only a question of what.

"What I need from you is simple, and I believe even you are capable of it." Ford pursed his lips as she continued. "You must keep Dipper in the circle until the last candle is out. No matter what may happen. Do you understand?" she asked again, casting a critical gaze upon him.

"Of course. It's not exactly rocket science."

"No. It's simple. If I lay bleeding out on the floor and Dipper begs you to let him to my side, you won't. It matters not how much he screams, struggles, knock him unconscious if you have to, but keep him in that circle. He can only leave once that room is covered in darkness."

"...Is that a potentiality?"

"I hope not. I will ask Mabel to do the same, in case you aren't enough to restrain him. But, truly, you're my failsafe. If something causes her to hesitate, you MUST control him. Otherwise... I cannot guarantee his safety, or yours. And if something happens to me, if you allow Dipper outside of that circle and some harm were to come to him... Trust me, Stanford Pines. I will not forget, and neither will you."

"Is that a threat?"

"It is a promise." She put her hand forward. He gave it a skeptical look, then locked his steely gaze onto hers. Evidently, he found what he was looking for in those black eyes. In the next moment he shook her hand firmly.

"Good. We will begin shortly. Prepare yourself."

Dipper felt no small amount of anxiety as Kells drew the lines in chalk around him. Each detail, each Latin word and angelic symbol of the complex geometry was beyond his limited understanding—he felt that even if he spent his entire life studying her craft, he still wouldn't be able to fully grasp it. This was hundreds of years of study and practice. She was silent and sober in her concentration, devoting all her attention to this ritual. He hadn't seen her this stoic and hell-bent since... since seven years ago. The last time she helped to banish Bill from this realm. That final day when she put aside her fear and her tears in order to save him and their world from the dream demon gone rogue.

He knew she was keeping something buried deep inside herself, no matter how often he tried to brush it off as his general paranoia. But prodding her at this point would yield nothing, and she was so wholly devoted to ridding him of Bill. It seemed rude, borderline cruel, to start questioning her motives now, despite the fact that she had so firmly and quietly plead ignorant at any attempt to pin down why Bill was returning... Whatever the answer was, why would she keep that from him?

Was she ashamed of something? Maybe she'd made a deal with him? He'd been tricked into deals with the demon before and so had his uncle, Dipper was well aware of how slick he could be—she had no reason to fear telling him the truth. _If_ that was the truth. If... It could be so much worse. Maybe she regretted her actions seven years ago, had been working with Bill all this time to get him back to Gravity Falls and pick up where they left off. Maybe this entire summer had been an elaborate plan to seduce him into playing host a second time. No, no—that was just... that was crazy talk. He was letting his paranoia run amok again, wreaking havoc on his vulnerable state. He reminded himself again that all his thoughts were entirely conjecture. He had to trust her. He had to try...

"Kells..."

"What is it?" her voice was low, matching his as she continued to draw painfully exact matrices on the wooden floor.

"I..." he couldn't do it. He couldn't ask her. Not now. Maybe later, once all of this was over...

"...I care about you."

"I know, Dipper." She sighed, sitting back onto folded legs for a moment, the white chalk in her hand leaving dust on her dress. "We are almost ready to begin. I need to... ask something of you."

"What is it?"

"After this is over, I want you to leave Gravity Falls, Dipper."

"Haha—" Funny, it was a funny joke. She couldn't be serious. "No no, I'm not leaving."

"You will. It is too dangerous for you here."

"Seriously? Kells, come on—"

"I want you gone. Soon enough you'll find... that there's nothing left for you here."

"You want...? What are you even saying?"

"I don't care where you go. But it can't be here. I don't want you near me."

His heart fell through his stomach. It crashed through the floor. No, it was in his throat, constricting his breath until it was impossible to inhale. She wouldn't look at him. So that was it. That was it, after all. Tossed aside like an old toy... She was making good on her promise that it wouldn't end well.

"Are you... what—" Before he could even give her a last desperate question, she pushed herself off the floor, stepping carefully over the runes laid out in chalk.

"Stanford, Mabel. It's time to light the candles. Dipper, please stay still for the remainder of the ritual. I would hate to see something happen to you." Though he quietly wished he could spin her around by the shoulder, somehow force her to explain herself, her intentions, her secrets... in the center of that labyrinthine diagram, he was prisoner until the procedure was done. Her last remark made it clear what would happen if he budged.

As soon as the three joined hands, with Kells' voice chanting in ages-old Latin that he could barely parse, he felt a pulse of sickness rush through him. He had no idea if it was the effect of the ritual already or if it was a result of what she'd said. She was deadly serious. Why would she want him to... Oh! Of course! Of course, she was trying to protect him—of course that was it, but what would she need to protect him from once Bill was gone for good? Maybe there was some larger threat looming on the horizon? That must have been what was troubling her all this time. The only alternative—that she well and truly wanted him to leave—was too much for Dipper to stomach. It had to be the former. That was all he could bear to accept.

Kells' eyes opened and a burning white light shone through them like holy fire. He'd never seen her like this before. Through a faraway haze like a fever dream he watched his body going through the ordeal, felt his head loll backwards, chest pulled forward as if an invisible string ran through his heart. It felt as though the entirety of his organs were concentrated in a pinpoint in the middle of his chest, slowly being drawn out inch by inch, though mercifully, it wasn't as horrifyingly painful. His vision blurred further the more he strained to make out the shadows against the ceiling. A distant ache pulled at his chest. He swam in and out of consciousness, monstrous shapes leaping out at him from the flickering shadows, harmless in the next instant. Distant laughter, all too familiar. Something bathed the room in a shining golden glow. There were shouts, harsh energy pulsing all around the room, and as he struggled to pull himself upright, he saw it.

"No, no, NO NO NO NO—!" The demon shrieked, twisting furiously in her grasp, but she held him fast by the wrist, hand sizzling with the effort of containing his energy. She pulled the monster close, wrapping arms painfully around him, skin frying and popping as if he were made of fire, but still she bore the pain with incredible grace—and he was gone. Kells hunched over where he had been, Dipper's vision swimming in and out of focus. She was crying. Her small, desperate wails of anguish reverberated through his skull. He tried to go to her, but a hand gently restrained him.

Kells embraced herself tightly, her fingertips digging into the skin of her back, and she released an unholy groan of pain as clarity slowly returned to him. He called her name and she sat up straight, turning to face him, dark arms still crossed over the front of her dress, thank god, she was okay, thank god, whatever god was out there—

Her neck snapped. Backwards it twisted, the crunch of bones moving in ways they were never intended to as her throat split in a neat, straight horizontal line. Blood poured from it in a pristine waterfall of crimson. Her arms fell, limp, to her side. Hands kept him from her, she needed him, she needed help, someone's help! What the fuck were they doing, keeping him there—why was he the only one trying to help?!

Her body distended, contorting hideously, legs snapping and reforming on their own. She was screaming. She was screaming. Tortured shrieks pierced his eardrums as he tore wildly to save her from whatever invisible hands were pulling her apart. Her fingers grew, long and sharp, more blood still blossoming from her abdomen, staining her dress even as her growth mercilessly ripped it to shreds. Two groping limbs burst from her sides, flailing for purpose as her others hung uselessly. God, oh god, what was happening to her?!

She fell forward like a discarded ragdoll, her head slamming into the floor with a sickening _smack_ as her vertebrae stretched and multiplied. The sound of flesh ripping open played beneath her garbled screams, each little bump of her spine breaking forth from her back in sharp spikes. Blue fire sparked on the fingertips of her new hands. It raced to engulf her as if she were coated in gasoline, catching on nothing but every inch of her being, leaving the sickly sweet scent of burning skin and hair in Dipper's lungs.

"LET ME GO!" He fought against his uncle's hands, his sister's sobs, as he watched Kells' horrifically disfigured body burn to ash before his eyes. Every part of her was pouring blood, she was burning alive from head to foot, and they wouldn't let him go, he couldn't do anything—

Blackness cloaked the room like a lantern snuffed out, smoke rising from the extinguished candles as a wave of lake water sloshed over the wooden floor. Kells was gone. His great uncle released him. All was silent but for the whimpering of his sister in the darkness and the heaving of Dipper's breath as he tried in vain to catch it. Kells' cries still rang in his ears, repeating like a broken record.

"Grunkle Ford," Mabel choked out before he had a chance to, "What happened? What happened to her?! Is she..."

"She's not dead," Dipper's hoarse voice answered, and for the first time he realized he was shaking, the back of his hand sloppily brushing a cold sweat from his brow.

"She's back in the lake."


End file.
